Social Media for Academics

Mark Carrigan

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781526459121, 9781526459114
• eBook ISBN: 9781526471451
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Digital Media

Social media has become an inescapable part of academic life. It has the power to transform scholarly communication and offers new opportunities to publish and publicise your work, to network in your discipline and beyond and to engage the public. However, to do so successfully requires a careful understanding of best practice, the risks, rewards and what it can mean to put your professional identity online. 

Inside you?ll find practical guidance and thoughtful insight on how to approach the opportunities and challenges that social media presents in ways that can be satisfying and sustainable as an academic. The guide has been updated throughout to reflect changes in social media and digital thinking since the last edition, including:

• The dark side of social media – from Trump to harassment
• Emerging forms of multimedia engagement – and how to use to your advantage 
• Auditing your online identity – the why and how
• Taking time out – how to do a social media sabbatical.

Visit Mark?s blog for more insights and discussion on social media academic practice.

1 Social media and digital scholarship

This chapter will:

• Explore what social media platforms are and why they matter
• Discuss the concept of digital scholarship and its implications for higher education
• Explore some significant characteristics of social media
• Introduce the topics covered throughout the rest of this book

Social media is everywhere. At least it can often seem like that. In little more than a decade, what were once online novelties have become taken-for-granted parts of everyday life for many, reflected in the sheer scale of their use. In 2011, 1.2 billion users worldwide logged into a social media site and the numbers across platforms have continued to rise ever since (van Dijck 2013: loc 123). Here are some facts about the day on which I wrote this paragraph, courtesy of the Internet Live Stats (2015) project:

• Over 3,351,200 blog posts have been published
• Over 696,800,000 tweets have been sent
• Over 7,581,700,000 videos have been viewed on YouTube
• Over 165,378,000 photos have been uploaded to Instagram
• Over 148,408,000 Tumblr posts have been uploaded
• Over 132,686,000 Skype calls have been made

These numbers increase at such a pace that they’re out of date by the time I’ve finished the list. When I return to the live counts at the end of writing this paragraph they’ve already increased, in some cases to a degree that can initially seem baffling when you consider the investment of time and energy implied in each single case that registers. When I was writing the first edition of this book, there were 3,147,131,306 internet users, 1,425,892,583 active users of Facebook, 312,852,100 active users of Twitter, 1,184,050,501 active users of Google+ and 75,085,140 active users of Pinterest. Only four years later, we find another billion Facebook users and almost three times as many users of Pinterest, though the growth of Twitter has plateaued and Google+ users plummeted as it was gradually shifted from a singular social network to a feature which cuts across Google’s other services, before being shut down entirely. I wrote in 2014 that those numbers give us some insight into what the buyers who have purchased 600,855 computers, 4,347,556 smartphones and 816,142 tablets today are likely to do with their new products. But four years later we have seen a consistent downwards trend in shipments of each category, reflecting a long-term shift away from computing, with people keeping devices for longer and a ready supply of devices in many already saturated markets (Statista 2019). There is frantic change in this sector but growth for some is matched by decline for others, as what was once bewilderingly new is becoming an established part of everyday life with consequences which are still making themselves felt (Lupton 2014b). Nonetheless, what remains constant is the scale of this activity, often framed as the largest increase there has ever been in the expressive capacity of humanity (Washington Post, 2016). The sheer quantity of the data involved in social media can be difficult to grasp. Cory Doctorow, activist and co-editor of Boing, offers a useful comparison:

A really top-notch cable operator might carry two hundred to five hundred TV channels, each one airing ten to twenty-four hours of programming a day. Assuming your cable operator had two hundred channels, that’s a minimum of two thousand hours of video a day. As of March 2014, YouTube was adding that much content every twenty minutes. (Doctorow 2014: 73)

Many have argued that we even need a new social science for a world in which Facebook processes 2.5 billion pieces of content, 2.7 billion ‘Like’ actions and 300 million photo uploads each day (Kitchin 2014). Not only do these platforms open up new ways of producing knowledge of social life, they do so at such scale and with such low costs that the challenge to the established social sciences is profound (Conte et al. 2012, Savage and Burrows 2007). Social media platforms are not just ‘out there’ as new objects of study, bringing about changes in social life. They are increasingly ‘in here’ as well, not just used by academics in the ways this book will explore, but reconfiguring what it is to be an academic in currently subtle but nonetheless significant ways. Another element of this change is the use of social media by administrators, students, librarians and others within the university. The once opaque ivory tower is becoming transparent, even as its walls remain in place, further unsettling established certainties at a time when the university is already changing – to the profound unease of many within it (Bacevic 2019). It’s this changing landscape which the book you’re holding (figuratively, if it’s the ebook) provides a guide for and because the landscape has changed significantly since the first edition, so too has the book. As with the first edition, social media platforms figure throughout but the underlying focus is on what this means for academics rather than the details of each and every platform. There’s a new chapter, ominously titled ‘The dark side of social media’, dealing with a lot of the most significant developments of the last four years. These are one of many changes to the existing text, though the rest are woven into its fabric in a more organic way which was difficult but satisfying (and felt enjoyably like editing a far too long blog post). My hope is this will update things where necessary while retaining the feel of the first edition.

Even if the text has changed significantly, the concerns underlying this edition are the same. At its foundation is the belief that social media is not something ephemeral, even if it is often used in ephemeral ways. Its emergence is tied up in profound changes underway within the world, which we are still only beginning to understand (Bratton 2016, Srnicek 2017). We are only now beginning to come to terms with the influence of social media and related technologies on society (Margetts 2017). Given how central the imagery of ‘the cloud’ has become to what we once talked about as ‘cyberspace’, it’s easy to forget how brutishly physical these processes are. Not just in the sense of the physical networks which make up the internet, and the enormous amounts of money and power tied up in their construction and maintenance (Blum 2012, Lewis 2014), but also the environmental impact of all this blogging, tweeting and sharing. At the point of writing, 2,411,265MWh electricity has been used so far on this day alone for the internet and 2,011,441 tons of CO₂ emissions have been generated (Internet Live Stats 2019). Incidentally there were almost a billion websites at the time of writing the first edition, leaving me oddly enthused by the knowledge that this arbitrary but nonetheless resonant milestone will have been long passed by the time you read this book. By the time I’m finishing the second edition in early 2019, there are approaching two billion websites, as estimated by Internet Live Stats (2019).

It’s remarkable how rapidly the terminology of social media has entered everyday life. Much as ‘googling’ has become a verb which ubiquitously characterises the activity of using an online search engine, so too has ‘tweeting’ come to define micro-blogging with what appears to be a comparable degree of penetration. Operators such as ‘@’ (addressing a user) and ‘#’ (indicating a hashtag) increasingly function as a syntax for social media in general (van Dijck 2013: loc 1484), as opposed to being restricted to Twitter as the platform on which they originated. But the related terminology of ‘retweets’ and ‘hashtags’ has been appropriated into the common lexicon in ways that would have been difficult to predict in the early days of social media. Despite being immersed in Twitter, I was amazed to learn that the hashtag has been widely taken up by young children as ‘a device for adding comment and emphasis in stories’, in spite of the fact that many or most of them do not use the service themselves (Brown 2015). Terms which only recently were used solely by those immersed in internet culture are sufficiently recognised to merit inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary. Words like ‘astroturfing’ (a fake grassroots political campaign) and ‘sock puppet’ (a fake social media account) have been recognised in this way and, through doing so, the social possibilities which this new technology affords are becoming more widely understood (Reed 2014). Some phrases with a long history within internet culture change as a result of their recognition. For instance ‘troll’ was once understood to be a deliberate provocateur, someone who sought to provoke discord and incite reactions in a planned way (Coleman 2014). It is now more commonly used as a generic designation for those who behave in anti-social and offensive ways online (Bartlett 2014). The meaning of existing words changes as a result of social media as well. Terms like ‘sharing’, ‘friending’ and ‘liking’ were part of the common vernacular long before Facebook and yet their meanings have begun to shift in ways that are still ongoing. It might seem that the change is subtle but I’m persuaded by van Dijck’s argument that what we mean by terms like ‘friend’ and ‘follower’ are in the process of what could be a radical change as a result of social media:

In the offline world, people who are ‘well connected’ are commonly understood to be individuals whose connections are gauged by their quality and status rather than their quantity. In the context of social media, the term ‘friends’ and its adjunct verb ‘friending’ have come to designate strong and weak ties, intimate contacts as well as total strangers. Their significance is commonly articulated in one indiscriminate number. The term ‘followers’ has undergone a similar transformation: the word connotes everything from neutral ‘groups’ to ‘devotees’ and ‘believers,’ but in the context of social media it has come to mean the sheer number of people who follow your twit stream. (van Dijck 2013: loc 307)

That social media is exercising such an influence over language shouldn’t be a surprise. As we saw earlier, the sheer number of users active on these services and the volume of communication taking place through them mean it would be confusing if they weren’t leading to changes in language and culture. Nonetheless, there are important social and cultural questions posed by this influence, which we should keep sight of when we think about using social media as academics. This is even more true because so many of these changes have begun to be felt within the academy since the first edition. Social media is becoming more prominent with each passing year, even if this varies between disciplines and fields in different national contexts. The cases where it has generated controversy are increasing in number, with some even generating international media attention. Academic freedom is under increasing scrutiny at precisely the moment when academics have new platforms from which to speak. Even if these controversies remain exceptional, they shape the conditions in which we all use social media, with universities increasingly torn between excitement about opportunities for impact and concern about potential impact for their corporate brand. These platforms are important for understanding how universities are changing, as much for how other changes are meditated through them as for their own independent effects (Bacevic 2018).

So why should I use social media?

I was a bit unnerved to realise the first edition never directly answered this question. To a certain extent this was because the whole book was effectively an extended answer but I also took it as given that readers would have already thought about it. What else would have led them to pick up the book? In the talks I’ve done since the book was released I’ve struggled with how best to approach this issue. There are many answers to this question which are probably familiar to you. Social media will expand your network, encourage people to read your publications and connect you with audiences outside the academy. These platforms offer opportunities to write and think in public, increasing your proficiency with each and expanding your profile in the process. Their intrinsic speed contrasts to the glacial pace of academic publishing. Their immediacy provides a satisfying release from the waiting which so often characterises the scholarly experience. They inevitably traverse the boundaries of the university, making it much easier to fall into conversation with our colleagues from different disciplines, while the brevity of a platform like Twitter provides a respite from the protracted style of academic exchange. The benefits can be immense, as increased visibility leads to more readers, more collaborations and more invitations. When 82% of publications in the humanities, 32% in the social sciences and 27% in the natural sciences go uncited, it is easy to see why social media platforms would prove alluring (Remler 2014). When journal articles which have been worked on for months or even years might be read hundreds of times at most, the ease with which a blog post can be read by thousands can prove intoxicating. When we’re increasingly tasked with coming down from the ivory tower, it can feel remarkably fortuitous to be presented with a set of tools which promise to help us do precisely this. For those preoccupied with the evident limitations of scholarly communications, it can be deeply exciting to consider how social media can be used by academics.

In the face of this, it can seem to many people as if the right question is not why should you use social media but why wouldn’t you? However, a note of caution is needed here because the increasingly widespread sense that this is something which academics now ought to do risks getting in the way of academics using these platforms in a satisfying and sustainable way. It’s definitely an improvement on the pervasive scepticism which social media for academics once provoked but there’s a risk that a narrow conception, preoccupied by personal visibility and career building, comes to dominate our sense of how these platforms ought to be used. These are real opportunities which social media offers but if we focus too narrowly on these individual benefits, we risk losing sight of the collective changes which social media can bring about. I’ve tried to ensure these collective possibilities figure strongly in this second edition, highlighting the ways in which a more open, engaged and collegial academy becomes feasible as academics take to social media. There are real opportunities here to recover values which many people think are in decline within the academy, making it possible to create spaces for intellectual exchange and scholarly collaboration outside the systems of measurement and counting which dominate so much of intellectual life within universities (Burrows 2012). We’re not going to save the academy through blogging, podcasting or tweeting. In fact we should be cautious about any account which takes it as a given that the academy is somehow under threat and needs saving (Bacevic 2019). But we might contribute to making it a faster, fairer and freer place than it is otherwise likely to be, as social media helps strengthen the autonomy of academic networks vis-à-vis the organisations within which they work. However, if too many of us pursue the individual benefits of social media then we risk swamping these spaces in new metrics, leaving Twitter followers and blog subscribers as little more than the metric of choice for the upwardly mobile careerist academic who aspires to supplement their impressive H-index (Morrish 2016). Ensuring that we avoid this entails dispensing with the hype that surrounds social media, as well as the perception that academics must engage or be left behind. It means being honest about the downsides of social media; its capacity to take up time, create discord, bring out the worst in people or leave them open to attack. It entails being realistic about what can be achieved, as well as being restrained about the expectations we have of our own use of it. It necessitates being clear about the corporate interests which the embrace of digital technology is inviting into the university, and what they mean for the future of higher education.

Throughout this second edition, I’ve tried to address the harmful hype surrounding social media and place the technology in a social, economic and political context. But given that I’m writing this book about social media in higher education and you’re reading it, it seems we agree there’s something here that goes beyond mere hype (Daniels and Feagin 2011). The way I approach this is to look at how new technology has changed, and might change, how each academic conducts their working life on an everyday level (Weller 2011). In part this is because I’m a sociologist who studies the internal dialogues of individuals in a social context: how we become who we are through the mundane business of everyday life (Archer 2007, Carrigan 2014a). But it’s also because social media has become integral to my own working life. Throughout this book I’ve tried to be upfront about my own experience as what Zhu and Purdam (2017) describe as an academic super user, always or often posting updates about my research on social media, not because I think every academic should use social media with the same frequency but simply because outliers like myself have found out a lot about how digital scholarship works on these platforms and these experiences are likely to be valuable to others. Many of these experiences are positive and, as I’ll discuss, these aspects have tended to dominate the conversation. But it’s important to understand the negative aspects as well. If these platforms are becoming part of university life then it’s important we consider the challenges as well as the opportunities, findings ways to help mitigate the former and embrace the latter.

If you are a frequent user who is interested in what social media means for scholarship, it is easy to become wrapped up in the scale of social media, breathlessly celebrating this explosion of human communication and collaboration. The iconoclastic critic of internet hype Evgeny Morozov describes this as ‘internet-centrism’: the idea ‘that we are living through unique, revolutionary times, in which the previous truths no longer hold, everything is undergoing profound change, and the need to “fix things” runs as high as ever’ (Morozov 2013: 15). To internet-centrists, technology is something outside society leading inexorably to radical change due to the unfolding of its internal logic. On this view, the internet becomes something we cannot resist. Social media will change everything in its wake, as we’re all forced to adapt to the radical new world it has created. However, as many critics of digital capitalism have pointed out, those most loudly proclaiming the inevitability of ‘disruption’ are also those with the biggest stake in the game. If radical change is on the horizon, indeed if it’s already here, perhaps we need guides to help us ‘weather the storm’. As one statement of this I encountered recently put it, ‘Above all, we hope to prepare you so you can survive and thrive through the coming titanic storm’ (Scoble and Israel 2014: loc 223). The problem is these guides have a vested interest in exaggerating the storm, as well as the difficulty of making your way through it. Much of our conversation about social media in th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• About the author
• New to this edition
• Foreword
• 1 Social media and digital scholarship
• 2 Using social media to publicise your work
• 3 Using social media to build your network
• 4 Using social media to manage information
• 5 Using social media for public engagement
• 6 The dark side of social media
• 7 Professional identity in an age of social media
• 8 Communicating effectively online
• 9 Finding the time for social media
• 10 Social media and the future of the university
• References
• Index