I’ve been involved in training academics to use social media for a long time. It’s a field I stumbled into during a part-time PhD, as a committed blogger who became a Twitter enthusiast in 2010, leaving me with a sense this was a valuable shift in academic life. I imagined that social media would lead to a more creative, curious and collegial academy. One resembling the online exchanges which were becoming a core part of my intellectual life. Over the subsequent years I began to recognise the dark side of social media, as I put in the second edition of my guide. The algorithmic promptings of platforms were bringing out the worst in status conscious academics, already prone to think in terms of citation counts and impact factors. There was a potent attention economy emerging at the intersection between the academy and social media which worried me greatly, even as my own position within it made objective precarity feel subjectively exciting because of the dizzying array of connections and opportunities which online visibility gave rise to. Or at least it did until the sheer exhaustion brought about by feeling like I continually had to perform ultimately brought me to the point of deleting my account.
It was a very odd experience of what the network theorist Emmanuel Lazega would describe as multiple inconsistent forms of status, being the most followed sociologist in the UK while also being a precariously employed part-time academic. In some contexts people related to me as if I were famous, in others the majority of people neither knew nor cared who I was. I was on first name terms with a huge number of the senior people in my field, but there was a recurrent sense of them not being able to place me which left me persistently rigid in my interactions with them. The real ways in which this platform capital could be leveraged into academic capital (speaking invitations, co-organisation of events and an endless stream of review requests) got in the way of the more traditional modes of accumulating academic capital. The fact I was clearly in many people’s eyes ‘shiny’, in some real but diffuse sense, made it easy to dick around doing what I was interested in in a completely amateurish fashion for a long time, neither pushing myself nor really gaining the satisfaction from my work that I do now. It also made precarity financially viable, through generous speaking fees and consultancy contracts, so long as I remained plugged into the network and sustaining my visibility. But @mark_carrigan was not me and it’s easy to see in retrospect how psychologically stunting it was to spend quite that much time fortifying an imaginary and algorithmically meditated representation of myself. I cared about it in a way that I now find as depressing as I do grimly fascinating.
I returned to Twitter a couple of times in instrumental and pragmatic ways, particularly after the reflexive imperative of the pandemic led me to commit to pursuing an academic career. I had wanted to escape what Richard Seymour called the Twittering Machine, yet my understanding of the mechanics of building an academic career led me to conclude that successfully escaping would damage my career. I found myself using it, as well as advising other academics about how to use it, without wanting to be there. It’s jarring to reflect on how much time I spent last decade encouraging academics to use social media. Not only do I now rarely use it myself. I actively exclude it from my working life. I use the Freedom blocker to keep social media sites permanently inaccessible from my laptop and desktop. I supplement this with Screentime on my phone, which means that when I choose to log into social media, there’s a fiddly process which takes minutes in order to unlock it. This certainly means that, as Mark Fisher once put it, I use social media “as a means of dissemination, communication and distribution” but I do “not live inside it”. It means that on the occasions when I log into social media, there is a clear purpose to what I am doing which leads me to go through the rigmarole of my (clearly slightly obsessive) blocking routine.
I rarely think about social media in my working life anymore. It remains an object of research but at a distance which gives me a different perspective on it. I’m co-writing two policy-orientated papers at the moment which is partly what’s provoked this post, specifically the realisation of how my attachment to it as a research object has mutated over time. I’ve been known to visibly recoil in meetings when someone suggests an activity which means I’ll have to unlock my access to the platforms. The longer I go without routinely using social media, the more conscious I am of how distracting and disorientating I find them. Did I always feel this way without realising it? Or has the habit of being detached from them left me newly sensitive to their siren song? Was I just really really addicted to things which everyone else has a healthy relationship to? Or was the depth of my immersion and my need to explicate a means to render explicit what most others leave as tacit?
I continue to see their value as a discovery device. On those occasions when I do log in, I’ll usually browse Twitter or LinkedIn for at least half an hour. This inevitably produces all manner of news, publications, resources or insights which are cumulatively enriching, even if each individual item might be relatively trivial. But I find it difficult to regain my composure afterwards. The mental calm which I now feel much of the time is displaced by a mental restlessness which feels all the more intrusive for the fact it’s no longer a ubiquitous feature of my experience. I feel like I’ve become ever more skilled at sublimating the drives over the last year, towards what is higher and wider rather than the closed loops which spiral towards nothingness. But whenever I encounter social media again as a vector of the drives, it reminds me how utterly precarious this achievement is. “post. post post. click. click. click’ as Jodi Dean once put it 🤐
I’ve become increasingly reluctant to offer professional advice about social media over the last couple of years. As a mid career scholar with a large existing footprint online, it’s relatively costless for me to opt out of academic social media. I can make announcements whenever I’m sufficiently motivated to go through the tedious process of unlocking my social media accounts. I have an engaged network on LinkedIn, a lot of followers on my remaining Twitter account (a repurposed project feed) and a blog which has a lot of email subscribers. I’m aware that when Generative AI for Academics is released later this year, I’ll probably need to adopt a less extreme stance towards social media. Or at least my publisher will try and cajole me to given the widespread expectation that academics are now as responsible as publishers for the promotion of their books. I’m sure I could promote my work far more effectively than I do, if I were willing to leverage this online presence more regularly. I can see little reason for me to do so though when the time and energy involved could be spent on other activities. Even if it were harming my career to continue in this way, I’m comfortable with that fact. But I’m aware there’s a privilege to escaping from the Twittering Machine, which leaves me uncomfortable with offering younger scholars advice about their digital presence.
Mark Carrigan 