In TroubleMakers, Leslie Berlin summarises the notion of Class 1 and Class 2 disputes propounded by Bob Taylor, founder and manager of Xerox PARC’s famous Computer Science Laboratory. Part of his renowned capacity to build community within the lab involved turning what might have been destructive disputes into constructive ones. On pg 105 Berlin explains how: […]
Tag: Social Media for Academics
I’m writing these notes for the Imagine 2027 project which has a relatively specific remit. Not all of these points will be uniformly valid and there are some things I don’t cover (e.g. the consent of speakers) but I’m sharing them here in case people find them useful: Begin the live tweeting by introducing the […]
Until Tyler Shores demonstrated it earlier today, it had never occurred to me that the wonderful Wayback Machine could be used to view the history of your social media feeds:
In the last couple of years, I’ve done around eighty talks on a variety of topics across a whole range of different settings. The biographical, professional and intellectual reasons why I’ve done so many are a topic for another post. What concerns me at the moment is how I prepare for them. To talk in […]
Over the last five years, I’ve managed a vast assortment of institutional social media feeds. These have included academic departments, research projects, journals, research networks, academic blogs and event series. I’ve included a selection of Twitter accounts I’ve solely or jointly managed below and I’ll show some of these in the session I’m doing at […]
I’m (re)reading this important paper by Tressie McMillan Cottom in advance of a talk which Karen Lumsden and I are doing tomorrow on the dark side of (digital) public engagement. We were asked to suggest a reading for the session and this immediately occurred as the most suitable. It’s a insightful, careful and honest appraisal of the […]
Towards the end of his life, Pierre Bourdieu underwent an activist turn and offered a public sociology which I’ve long thought we can learn much from. In his Firing Back, he offers important ideas about how academics and social movements can work together. He maintains that “the work of academic researchers is indispensable to disclose […]
It was perhaps inevitable that I would find myself obsessing over the role of social media in the current strikes. In my academic life, I’m a sociologist studying how social media is used within universities and how this is changing the academy. In my non-academic life, I’m a digital engagement specialist at a charity and […]
10am – 4pm, Saturday 24 February 2018 Palmer 101, Whiteknights Campus, University of Reading ‘Social Listening’ Workshop Following the interdisciplinary showcase conference ‘’Social Listening’ in the past, present and future’ in November 2017, we are pleased to announce a British Academy funded follow-up workshop. Taking place at the University of Reading on 24 February 2018, […]
I was really excited to come across these two important initiatives concerning social media use in higher education. Firstly, Laura Pasquini is organising a series of Twitter chats about Higher Education Digital Identity (#HEdigID): Secondly, Bonnie Stewart and Natalie Delia Deckard are running an EdX course on Engagement in a Time of Polarization: How can we work together in […]
A video of my talk is available here, starting at 2 hours in.
What is the relationship between social media and individualism? It is often claimed that these platforms engender a preoccupation with the self, easily cast in terms of individualism. But it is a preoccupation which is just as often claimed to be profoundly social, in so far as that it involves a concern with how many […]
I’m currently reading On Intellectual Craftsmanship, in preparation for a talk I’m doing in Berlin next week. This famous appendix to The Sociological Imagination is something I’ve long been inspired by, finding in it a way of organising my own life that belies the text’s apparently humble ambition to merely guide the novice scholar through […]
In the new year, I’ll be giving a talk at the Arctic University of Norway on using social media as a social theorist. This post is an initial attempt to get my thoughts on paper before the break, in order to make it easier to get the talk written when I get back from holiday. […]
The ESRC offer a list of nine factors which help generate impact: establishing networks and relationships with research users acknowledging the expertise and active roles played by research users in making impact happen involving users at all stages of the research, including working with user stakeholder and participatory groups flexible knowledge exchange strategies, which recognise […]
What are learned societies for? This is how Jennifer Platt answers this question on loc 119 of her history of the British Sociological Association: Learned societies such as the BSA are a vital part of the social structure of academic life; not every eligible person belongs to one, but nonetheless all are affected by them. […]
These are points I feel I reach relatively frequently, as identifiable discursive predicaments lead discussions between people who might otherwise agree to instead break down: Agreement with an argument in principle but concern about the practical implications of that agreement. For example if a particular issue has suddenly become prominent in public debate, it will inevitably […]
Earlier today at the British Academy’s Social Listening event, Paul Crayston used this extract from Edmund Burke to illustrate a point about the tendency of social media users to mistake the noise they make within their own milieux for the activity taking place on the platform as a whole. Because half a dozen grasshoppers under […]
