Tag: Social Media for Academics

How do we stop social media making the academy even more unequal?

January 20, 2023
LinkedIn as a replacement for academic Twitter: micro-blogs vs Twitter threads

I always found LinkedIn a sterile place in comparison to the vibrancy of academic Twitter. I’ve deleted numerous accounts over the years; establishing new ones because it feel like a sensible thing to do as a freelancer before once more coming to the conclusion the site was pointless and deleting it. This began to change […]

January 19, 2023
The false dichotomy of digital hermits and digital champions

In a memorable turn of phrase Patrick Dunleavy once wrote about academic hermits “sitting alone on top of a pillar somewhere in academia and doing their level best to not communicate in any way with the outside world, or let any information about their work leak out”. It was informed by the findings of the […]

January 17, 2023
Social Media for Public Engagement: Opportunities and Dilemmas

January 17, 2023
The increasingly hierarchical character of academic social media in 2023

I remember when it was possible to fill an event by just tweeting about it a few times from a highly visible account. It made organising events so easy and so much more fun as a result. Whereas now you need to share across countless social platforms and mailing lists. This is what happens when […]

January 9, 2023
Why we need a post-digital approach to the platform university

One of the virtues of a postdigital approach to technology within higher education is that it helps us unpick two seemingly contradictory stances: marginalisation and the shock of the new. There is a tendency to see technology as a contingent part of the research process which is peripheral to its core operations. For example the […]

December 29, 2022
Requiem for a Tweet – Is there a future for the academic social capital held on the platform?

Originally posted on the LSE Impact Blog In the early days of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, I imagined the worst-case scenario to be that a platform already rife with troubling behaviour would become something even darker and more problematic. What I didn’t expect was a potentially existential doom loop in which advertisers already spooked by the […]

November 21, 2022
Should I rejoin Twitter?

In about 4 days my Twitter account will be deleted forever if I don’t login to the system. The widely reported failures afflicting the service as Musk guts the organisation mean I should probably log in before that if I want to ensure I have access. I was pretty sure I wanted to leave the […]

November 18, 2022
How do you use social media for PGT programmes?

I’ve been thinking about this question a lot since starting as programme director for the MA Digital Technologies, Communication and Education at the University of Manchester. We have a Twitter account and a LinkedIn page though neither has been used consistently since they were setup. I suspect this is typical of social media accounts for […]

June 9, 2022
Social media for academics and the circulation of expert concepts

There’s a fascinating extract in the Real Life newsletter about the contemporary manifestation of what Giddens called the double hermeneutic: the two way relationship between expert concepts and lay concepts which means (amongst other things) that the former often drift into being the latter. ‘Algorithm’ is an excellent example of this, as David Beer pointed […]

November 29, 2021
I’ve been slowly developing a philosophy of academic development without realising this is what I was doing

One of the multiple hats I wear is academic developer as much as I tend not to use the term. I’ve been training academics in the use of social media for over a decade through workshops, seminars, books, articles, blog posts, podcasts and videocasts. As much as I’m pleased that people often seem to find […]

November 20, 2021
A comprehensive introduction to Social Media for Academics

I just noticed this webinar I did a few years ago has been uploaded to YouTube. The sound quality is really poor but it’s the most comprehensive introduction I’ve recorded online:

October 8, 2021
What is the ivory tower becoming?

In recent years, we have seen an explosion of social media activity within the university. In some ways, this isn’t a surprise, with students leading the way in social media becoming a ubiquitous part of everyday life. It’s also not a surprise that this has led universities to increasingly see social media as an important part of their recruitment and engagement, leading to widespread use in communications and student affairs. What is perhaps more surprising is how faculty have taken to social media, both to talk among themselves and to engage with wider publics beyond the academy.

September 19, 2021
Why I deleted my personal Twitter account

I wrote in late 2019 about why I was deleting my personal Twitter account. This extract from Casey Newton’s newsletter perfectly captures my experience without the academic jargon I was leaning on to articulate it. My experience was that you either bleed time and energy into this dynamic or you feel like an asshole for ignoring people who misunderstand you.

September 9, 2021
Someone is wrong on the internet: a conversation between web comics

March 6, 2021
What’s gone wrong with social media in higher education and why we urgently need to fix it

Social media has gone from fringe to mainstream in higher education within the last decade. A culture has developed around it which shapes how it is used by academics and how that use is evaluated. However a range of problems are emerging which that culture is proving unable to address. I explore these problems and suggest how we could reorientate social media culture within universities and why this is necessary.

February 20, 2021
Hope Not Hate’s recommendations for Zoom security

It distresses me how easily this can be explained in the terms of 00s cyberutopianism. Does Zoom somehow encourage racist attacks? Or does it simply lower the transaction costs sufficiently that scores of racists not quite motivated enough to attack physical events are now willing to do so.

February 19, 2021
A quick guide to academic podcasting during a pandemic (part 1)

These are notes for Knowledge, Power, Politics students which I’m sharing in case they’re useful for other people The easiest starting point when planning a podcast is to identify podcasts which you’ve enjoyed. My favourite non-academic podcasts are QAnon Anonymous (a weird mix of citizen journalism, comedy and real time social theory), Novara media (a […]

January 31, 2021
Best practice for communicating with delegates during online conferences

I’m taking part in a panel at the European Consortium for Political Research tomorrow and I’ve been really impressed by their e-mail updates to participants. In effect there’s a daily newsletter with the following features: Invitations to share through a hashtag or six themed walls on their website Detailed guidance about how to take part, […]

August 25, 2020
Social media for academics and Covid-19

In this fireside chat from the Australian National University’s Get #SoMe course, Mark Carrigan and Inger Mewburn discuss social media for academics, the challenges of digital scholarship and their significance when daily life is being transformed by Covid-19.

August 12, 2020