Reblog> The scholar and social media

Excellent advice here from Tamson Pietsch on the uses and limits of social media, especially blogging. Found through @HelenPallett.

I very much support the ethos and practices suggested here:

The scholar and the social media

Last week I gave a talk on social media to post-graduates from the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Foolishly (but only fairly) I promised to practice what I preached. So here are the salient points (and links) as I remember them.

Why you should think about the social media

Increasingly scholarly conversation is happening online – in curated and individual blogs, on twitter, and through other electronic forums. If you are not engaging with these forms of publication you are likely to be missing part of what is happening in your field.

Participating in the world of social media helps generate a bigger (and more diverse) academic audience for your research. Much of this will be in aligned disciplines, or in different national contexts. If you are not engaging online, you’ll be missing part of your potential audience.

Social media also helps generate a broader non-academic audience, especially with those industries to which your thesis may connect. Try to consciously develop and promote your “shadow expertise”; that aspect of your work that might inform a non-academic sector. It’s tough in the academic job market, and this could well be where your post-phd career ends up going.

And finally, social media is increasingly a factor in every employment sector. Engaging online gives you skills that will serve you well, wherever you work.

But always remember the golden rule

NEVER LET YOUR MOUTH EXCEED YOUR VOICE.

This is Stefan Collini’s advice to public intellectuals in Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain and it should be etched onto the computer screens of every academic who reaches for the internet. Have something to say that is well founded and established, and well supported. Be respectful of other people’s work and opinions and give them due reference. The last thing a junior (or indeed any) academic needs is to have a ruined reputation all over the internet.

If there is a second rule, it might be this: VALUE YOUR TIME – blogging & tweeting can be very rewarding because unlike most other parts of academic life you get direct feedback. But it’s a drug. Keep your main game in view and remember: your authority to speak will in 98% of cases come from your research. So respect it, foster it, prioritise it.

How to start

See how other people are doing it. Set up a twitter account and follow scholars you admire (and those you don’t!) Read the relevant blogs in your field – some of these are likely to be co-authored. If you are totally lost, The Chronicle of Higher Education’s blog page is as good a place as any to begin (and you have discovered this blog so you’re not doing too badly!)

People disagree on the merits of maintaining an individual blog as against contributing to established co-authored or other forums such as The Conversation, but my view is to go for both:

Set up a blog site for yourself that will act a bit like your online CV:
- use it to a) experiment with writing pieces and b) as a place to collect any material you publish on other platforms. WordPress is easy to use and integrates well with other social media.
Generate content:
- Work in progress & the process of working (see for eg. the Thesis Whisperer or Trickster Prince).
- Communicate research you have published (eg https://t.co/UCbgE8RslC)
- Wait for news item & apply research
- Provide context through your “shadow expertise” – are you writing a Phd on the history of fashion? Contact fashion magazines and pitch articles to them.
Maximise your reach
- Connect to other people’s online content through using links, and cross-promote on twitter (using #hashtags), facebook, linkedin and academia.edu.au, among other social media outlets.
- Write for established platforms, such as co-authored blogs, The Conversation, print outlets, your university, industry publications. The internet is a big place with a lot of shouting people on it, and you need to find a way to be heard. Established sites offer you support and a readership that is invaluable.

Parting comments

Academic research usually takes a long time to produce. It frequently works with complex information and tells stories that complicate what we think we know. The interwebs do not thrive on such complexity. This doesn’t mean you should go for simplifications , but it does mean you need to work with people’s attention spans. Put your argument up front, rather than at the end; try to stick to 500-800 words maximum. Inject some personality. Too often wonderful academic research is communicated in ways that do not make it easy for people to access or connect with. Paywalls and professional convention carry part of the responsibility, but as scholars we can do a lot more too to reach out to a public that has demonstrated a robust appetite for ideas.

Reading list

Prof Patrick Dunleavy’s Shorter, better, faster, free: blogging changes the nature of academic research, not just how it is communicated and How to write a blogpost from your journal article

LSE public impact blog and in particular their twitter guide and reading list on using social media for research

The Times Higher Education magazine’s Tips for academics on Blogging and Social Media

4 January, 2016

Reasons blogging is beneficial for academics (via THE)

About 6 months ago I wrote a little about blogging here and solicited some responses from other geographers that blog, some of the reasons we gave for blogging possibly sit behind those (very good but slightly more instrumental) ‘seven reasons why blogging can make you a better academic writer‘ given by Pat Thompson and re-blogged recently by the Times Higher on their website. I also think that Martin Weller’s piece for The Chronicle “The Virtues of Blogging as Scholarly Activity” still stands the test of time and acts as a good companion piece here…

28 August, 2015

Reblog> 40 reasons why you should blog about your research

A post from about a year ago on Sociological Imagination – seen via Stuart Elden…

I particularly agree with:

It’s a great way of making connections & finding potential collaborators.
It can provide an archive of your thoughts, ideas and reactions which can later be incorporated into more formal work.
It makes it easier for people to find your published work and increases the likelihood they will read and cite it.
Its informality and immediate accessibility can help make writing part of your everyday life rather than being a source of stress and anxiety.
Its a great way to promote events and call for papers. Particularly if you blog regularly and your blog is connected to Twitter.
It helps ensure you can continue to develop strands of thought which, for now, don’t have any practical implications but might at some point in the future.
It encourages you to reflexively interrogate and organise your work, drawing out emergent themes and placing isolated snippets of commentary into shared categories.

18 August, 2015

In Certain Places…

In Certain Places is a programme of artistic interventions and events, led by curators Elaine Speight and Professor Charles Quick with the support of associate Rachel Bartholomew, in the School of Art, Design and Fashion at the University of Central Lancashire. Based in the City of Preston, in the North West of England, the project examines how artists can contribute to the form and functions of a place, by exploring new approaches to art, culture and urban development.

We have set up a new In Certain Places blog. Check out our first post ‘Re-imagining Rural Mythologies’ https://t.co/VtpoTFZwSg

– In Certain Places (@InCertainPlaces) August 18, 2015

In Certain Places, whom I happen to follow on Twitter, have a new blog – looking forward to seeing what gets posted. The first post is about the recent Nordic Geographers conference, in which several of my colleagues participated.

2 July, 20152 July, 2015

Reblog> Why we recommend a NO in the referendum – in 6 short bullet points

Political economy via blogging… Yannis Varoufakis’ blog makes for an interesting read – extraordinary that a finance/treasury chief keeps a blog, and indeed has time to do so!

Here’s his powerful and succinct (and remarkably polite) six bullet points for voting ‘no’ in this weekend’s referendum in Greece:

Why we recommend a NO in the referendum – in 6 short bullet points

Negotiations have stalled because Greece’s creditors (a) refused to reduce our un-payable public debt and (b) insisted that it should be repaid ‘parametrically’ by the weakest members of our society, their children and their grandchildren
The IMF, the United States’ government, many other governments around the globe, and most independent economists believe – along with us – that the debt must be restructured.
The Eurogroup had previously (November 2012) conceded that the debt ought to be restructured but is refusing to commit to a debt restructure
Since the announcement of the referendum, official Europe has sent signals that they are ready to discuss debt restructuring. These signals show that official Europe too would vote NO on its own ‘final’ offer.
Greece will stay in the euro. Deposits in Greece’s banks are safe. Creditors have chosen the strategy of blackmail based on bank closures. The current impasse is due to this choice by the creditors and not by the Greek government discontinuing the negotiations or any Greek thoughts of Grexit and devaluation. Greece’s place in the Eurozone and in the European Union is non-negotiable.
The future demands a proud Greece within the Eurozone and at the heart of Europe. This future demands that Greeks say a big NO on Sunday, that we stay in the Euro Area, and that, with the power vested upon us by that NO, we renegotiate Greece’s public debt as well as the distribution of burdens between the haves and the have nots.

Via: For Another Critique of the Pyramid, Nicholas Crane’s blog.

9 June, 20152 July, 2015

The anti-social academic blogger? A post by Sam Merrill

Over on his (re)new(ed) blog/site Sam Merrill has posted about blogging and his uneasiness with some of the less collegial, more narcissistic, and perhaps more target-driven (in the vein of h-index etc. perhaps[?]) implications of blogging becoming a normalised part of academic practice. Its definitely worth a read in full [here] but I’ve copied some choice excerpts below…

It all reminds me just a little too much of Zygmunt Bauman’s keynote at the re:publica 15 conference that I attended last month. He discussed how today most people seek publicity rather than privacy, primarily through social media use, and they are thus replacing the community networks which previously belonged to them with the social networks to which they now belong. […]

There is now a widespread acknowledgement that academic progression, especially at the early career stage, often relies on one’s ability to develop their own recognisable brand. This narcissist factor of academic social media use is another that leaves me feeling inherently uneasy about blogging even as I engage in it more and more willingly (the narcissism that is, not the blogging). […]

Although there is little new about Bauman’s prognosis – that social media leads to the state of being alone together – the fact a future colleague later admitted that what Bauman had described sounded just like him made me shudder as I realised that if the pressure to use social media and the Internet for academic purposes was so apparent across the disciplines that I had already encountered (archaeology and geography in particular), then what must it be like in the field of social media studies that I was about to join – and how would I ever find enough time to relieve it!

I suppose I’m inclined to argue that including blogging in your academic practice is only really worth it if it isn’t a chore, if it doesn’t become another target to hit, and if it enables us to celebrate our collective exploration of ideas – otherwise, its surely (yet) another instrument of ‘governmentality‘ ~ those logics we internalise by which we are in some sense controlled, as workers, and become alienated from our labours… in the sense in which it seems that those that work in academia (at least in the UK) are really good at internalising and living out precisely those logics we critique as neo-liberal (i.e. the REF and so on…) and just to be crystal clear, I am just as guilty of this as any.

5 June, 20152 July, 2015

Professional web presence

Another post from a train (with very poor connection and so actually uploaded from my office)…

Re-reading the responses by Clive Barnett and Jeremy Crampton to my post about ‘being a sharing academic‘ reminded me, eventually, about the conversations held on the JiscMail list ‘Crit-Geog-Forum‘ about blogging in March 2011, the session ‘Between freedom and narcissism?‘ at the AAG in 2013, for which Scott Rodgers wrote a really useful blogpost (see below) and the useful publication by Wilson and Starkweather in the Professional Geographer on the ‘web presence of academic geographers‘.

Scott Rodgers reflected upon how he uses his blog, in 2013, and opened his thoughts out to consider how he has drifted away from ‘myopic blog-writing’ to engaging in discussion and sharing across several different kinds/platforms of media. Concluding his blogpost Scott argued, and I can only agree, that:

contemporary social media are becoming less and less tools that academics can opt out of. Rather, they increasingly comprise the basic environments of academic practice, and at a time of shifting priorities in higher education, these are environments academics need to claim.

The conclusions to the paper by Wilson and Starkweather are another useful way of framing some of the issues that arose between the blogposts written by Clive, Jeremy and myself and I think are worth quoting here:

The Web presence of academic geographers can no longer necessarily be described as a static online listing of the accomplishments of an individual scholar. Instead, the Web practices of academic geographers are increasingly marked by … a focus on online interaction and engagement, despite the lack of professionalization along these lines. Early-career geographers are likely not trained in this aspect of academic reproduction and might be flatly discouraged from “wasting their time” by producing online content. Given the continually shifting norms of online practices in society, and in academia itself, however, perhaps serious debate about strategies for using [social media] tools should enter into the training and professionalization of young scholars. The fact that academics would best avoid directing all of their writing energies into their Twitter account is all the more reason for explicit discussions about how to productively manage one’s Web presence.

We do not believe that it is wise to dismiss blogging, microblogging, and online social networking as nothing more than a distraction from the serious work of academic life. Not only are these new patterns of online engagement seemingly here to stay and are likely bound up in broader shifts in performance pressures but they also offer some notable potential scholarly benefits if used with intention.

First, pressures to publish and promote have spilled out into Web practices like blogging and microblogging. The blog can act as a way to claim intellectual territory, just as it can provide a space to share nascent ideas and work out scholarly thought in conversation with far-flung peers.

Second, and relatedly, online social networks and other informal venues for sharing scholarly productions have become important amidst the uncertainty of secure employment alongside the neoliberalization of the university. Junior academics, perhaps more than their senior colleagues, might rely on these Web practices to remain visible and viable among a growing body of recently minted PhDs.

Third, many junior scholars likely completed the bulk of their advanced degree post-Facebook. These online social networks provide the avenue for keeping informed of others’ engagements (scholarly and otherwise) and nurture the local and translocal collectives that are so important in the professional development of early-career academic geographers.

…
As institutions of higher education grapple with new pressures in a knowledge economy, academic geographers should incorporate everyday Web practices alongside the more observed and investigated techniques of a neoliberalizing academe.

(Wilson and Starkweather 2014, p. 79, additional emphasis)

I wonder, not least as a committee member of two RGS-IBG research groups, if the need for integrating the uses of various media into the training and professionalisation of early-career academics might be better-served by professional associations such as the AAG and the RGS-IBG. We could, for example, offer workshops as part of annual conferences and events. If nothing else, we could help one another by more-openly sharing things that have worked for us and perhaps where we may have slipped-up and how that might be avoided. This is definitely something I think is worth consideration by those involved in our professional associations.

4 June, 20152 July, 2015

Curating attention (Being a sharing academic pt. II)

My post from the train yesterday on blogging kept me thinking throughout the day. I wanted to discuss some of the responses (which makes up the majority of this post) and quickly clarify a couple of things. My initial post was, I recognise a little bit hypocritical: 1. My blog wouldn’t meet the ‘regular’ criteria I suggested for the list of blogs; and so, 2. I recognise that I am not, by any means, an exemplar of the sharing to which I aspire.

The blogpost led me to solicit some responses via Twitter (to which I’ll return) and I was really pleased to read posts from Jeremy Crampton and Clive Barnett, whose blogs and wider work I regularly read and admire. Likewise, not least because it is cross-posted there, the blog generated a little bit of discussion on Twitter with some interesting comments from Gillian Rose and Murray Lowe:

@CLIVEYB I agree with @samkinsley about solitariness of geog bloggers, inc me, and with @JeremyCrampton that twitter is better for sharing.

– gillian rose (@ProfGillian) June 3, 2015

@ProfGillian @CLIVEYB @samkinsley @JeremyCrampton Its definitely a bit more dynamic, although so much that a lot whizzes by

– Murray Low (@MurrayLow3) June 3, 2015

I very much welcome further comments and responses, so please do feel free to comment, blog elsewhere or tweet 🙂

Nevertheless, I wanted to collect together the conversation (so far) here (and I’ll return to that idea) and draw out two key points and make some comments.

First, in response to my observation about the use of some of the social plug-ins like ‘re-blog’ Jeremy (who does use it) observed

This works very well within the WordPress ecosystem, but have you noticed how infrequently this option comes up on blogs or news stories etc”¦they all have Instagram (never used it) Reddit (ditto) etc but not reblog.

to which I can only agree and add the corollary that, as I touched on in my earlier post, sharing and developing ideas cannot be platform-dependent, as both Jeremy and Gillian noted:

twitter is where things seemed to be shared most effectively

The ethos of sharing I am trying to invoke has to go where the conversations can best be served. As Martin Weller suggests in the piece in The Chronicle to which I linked previously:

A key aspect of the digital revolution is not the direct replacement of one form of scholarly activity with another, but rather the addition of alternatives to existing forms

We might do this across all sorts of media, from Twitter and Facebook, to Instagram and Reddit (as Jeremy suggests) and further to Tumblr, Pinterest, and Storify. The most important thing for me here is that we are convening a conversation at all and that it brings about the opportunity to share, celebrate, and disagree about topics that matter to us. So, and to clarify, I am arguing that for me it’s not about the nuts-and-bolts of the platform, it’s about the ethos of sharing.

This leads me on to my second point. In his post about the uses of blogging and his own blog, my colleague Clive Barnett makes an interesting case for the necessity to see the activity as both a personal fulfilment; a ploughing of an individual furrow (i.e. the ‘lone wolf’) and a contribution to collective knowledge production. The way in which I agree with this is in terms of another observation Clive makes:

I can see how a blog can serve as a way in which one can curate one’s own on-going thinking.

While I totally agree with both Jeremy’s and Gillian’s points about Twitter being the medium par excellence for sharing things, the considered thinking through of what is shared, through comments and responses at length, and the bringing together of multiple sources (like in this post) remains better served by blogs. As Clive says (and so have many others), academic sharing is a form of curation.

Curation certainly can be the ‘micro-broadcasting’ and the ‘construction of anonymous publics’ Clive discusses, through tags, categories, hashtags and so on. It can also be the bringing together of interlocutors both on and off the blog. The curation is never solely located on the blog: the blog is instead a signifier, perhaps a place-holder, for the performance of the curation/conversation. If, as Clive argues, ‘sharing only makes sense if things are separable‘ then the activities of curation are precisely those means of doing the separating (and assembling).

I want to make a final observation about attention, which Clive raises. If this mode of sharing (blogging and using social media) I’ve been stumbling over suggesting is roughly analogous to care of one’s self (Clive’s ‘Me’) in the form of writing[1] then the mechanisms of that writing can both enable and hamper that care. In publicly curating ideas we are soliciting attention and the platforms are not neutral equipment in that solicitation.

To post and share on social media is not only to share with readers but also with those who own/run the platform for the purposes of marketing. Likewise, when and how we ‘pay attention’, as users, is also surveilled in order to serve adverts. Attention then, is commodified (as Patrick Crogan and I highlighted in a 2012 theme issue of Culture Machine).

I whole-heartedly agree that Twitter, in particular, has been brilliantly useful for sharing –like Jeremy I joined in 2009 and it has very much enriched my academic life. Nevertheless, those conversations are only really easily accessible in the moment (which is fine, up to a point) but it is non-trivial to retrieve them from Twitter’s archive (if you want). What you post to Twitter and other social media platforms, as data, is a commodity – and it has a monetary value.

So, as with traditional forms of publication (in the guise of journal articles [behind the paywall] or monographs [in expensive hardcover only editions]) we have to remain mindful about access: who has it, who the gatekeepers are, and how we accordingly curate our forms of sharing. Nonetheless, I strongly believe that such sharing is vital. To misquote Beckett (again): “share again, share better“.

Notes

1. And thus a form of hypomnesis (riffing on Jeremy’s allusion to his work on Foucault and hypomnemata) ~ worth reading Stiegler on this, see: this Ars Industrialis vocabulary entry.