About this time last year, I think, I was asked to contribute to a PGR training course, for a session covering social media and blogging. It never happened due to the strike action at the end of the autumn term – and that is starting to feel like a really serious gap in those students’ training. It should now be obvious that this topic deserves more emphasis than being scheduled in December (by which time, one suspects, student attention may be dropping off), going hand in hand with a different focus: this is not (just) about public engagement and self-publicity, an optional extra that tends to reinforce the idea that PGRs and ECRs are expected to do more and more to have any chance of an academic career. Rather, in this new world, it looks more and more like THE essential toolkit for networking, in the absence of conferences and the like, since the informal networking element is precisely the aspect of conferences it’s hardest to replicate online.
I write this as someone who dislikes big conferences, is pretty hopeless at networking, and absolutely hated my PhD supervisor for months for forcing me to introduce myself to people – and even I can’t deny that it has sometimes been enormously productive (and occasionally even enjoyable in retrospect). It’s especially important where students are in a department with only a small graduate community, but even in bigger universities the likelihood is that other people working in your field will be elsewhere – and meeting them is the quickest route to realising that you may benefit more from exchange and even collaboration, rather than thinking of them simply as the people who may wreck your research project by Saying It First. And it’s equally important to start building a sense of all the relevant work that’s going on, to be able to situate your project and calibrate your own interventions in the debate, and hear about opportunities at an early stage. Listening to conference papers offers a partial snapshot of the field, but in a passive and distanced manner; just as important is the gradual induction into the communities of researchers, including being recognised as one of them, and the benefits of the reciprocal exchange that can follow.
Online conferences offer the papers, and a chance to ask questions about them; I’m less persuaded, on experience so far, that they’re very effective at promoting wider discussion. What they really don’t do well is the equivalent of the coffee break afterwards, where the group can fragment and reconfigure itself in different combinations, not necessarily involving the speaker; the chance to nervously approach someone else who was in the audience and attempt to introduce yourself, or to tag along with a group.
What we have instead is Twitter. Now of course this platform is at least as hierarchical as any academic conference, and when approaching any established academic on Twitter it’s safest to assume that they’re thin-skinned and stuffy until proven otherwise. It’s also public, of course, and the online equivalent of having got horribly drunk and embarrassingly loud at the conference dinner the previous evening is the possibility of someone checking your profile and recent tweets before deciding whether or how to engage.
But the big advantage is the old “on the internet, no one knows you’re a dog” thing. Or, knows that you’re chronically shy and socially awkward. Twitter offers the possibility of better interaction than at a conference; it’s gradual, so you can follow someone for a while before deciding to take the plunge and interact, and it’s asynchronous, so you can prepare your opening gambit and it won’t sound prepared, and it will come off the way you planned (as opposed to the classic HellosorrymysupervisorsaidIshouldtalktoyousorryImeanIreallyamabigadmirerofyourbooktheonewiththeredcoversorryforgottosaymynamesorryAAAAARRGHHH! [exit hurriedly stage left]). Similarly, you can then weigh your replies, rather than having to respond on the spot (which is equally an advantage for us older people, especially those whose hearing has long since decided that big, crowded rooms are not worth the effort).
It’s perfectly possible that many (most?) PGRs already know all this – you’re the digital natives, after all – and just need a bit of encouragement and perhaps some hints that older academics may not engage with quite the same ease or confidence. Ideally, of course, more senior academics would *also* be taking training courses in these new forms of networking; no, Twitter is not just a means for you to advertise your new book, even if the only reason you’re on it is that your publisher told you to. In the new post-COVID world, I think there will be more of an obligation on established scholars to be on here, and to be accessible; to learn new forms of interaction and networking – to see this as part of our responsibility to the wider discipline.
Absolutely basic principles: don’t pull rank, don’t dump on people, and if you have lots of followers take some responsibility for their engagement with people who engage with you. There is certainly an issue with the fact that, unlike at most academic conferences, the people who try to engage with you may or may not have any experience in the discipline, and may not even be engaging in good faith, but all you can really do is be aware of this possibility; I think it’s up to you whether you respond initially to people in exactly the same way and see how it plays out, or try to establish the person’s academic standing, so to speak, and engage accordingly – I can imagine both approaches working. The main area where I have no real experience, being male and generally working on less controversial topics, is how to manage bona fide interactions when you generally have to operate a stringent policy of block lists and other forms of self-protection against trolls – if anyone with experience in that area wants to offer advice in the comments, I’d be very grateful.
Ideally, I think colleagues should go further, the online equivalent of not just giving up a bit of time to chat but buying the coffee or lunch for younger colleagues: follow junior scholars and PGRs rather than just accepting their homage and paying attention only to your “peers”, amplify their ideas and writings, engage in debates on their terms rather than insisting on your own. What was more interesting at the last major conference, meeting eager young scholars who wanted to engage with your ideas and take them to new places, or hanging out with the same old crowd to gossip about other members of same old crowd? Yes, I know some people will answer B; that’s why we still have Facebook. Finally, don’t be a creep – remember, we can all see you, and if you’re already sliding off into DMs so we can’t all see you: bad sign…
I remain quite excited about next year’s teaching, despite all the uncertainty and mixed messages from higher authority and anxiety, above all because of the sense (as I think I’ve mentioned on here before) that my years spent in online music discussions, gradually building a community (complete with social norms and in-group language) out of a shared interest, are suddenly going to pay off. There is potential here for deeper, more engaged and egalitarian student discussion than is the norm in ‘regular’ seminars.
And actually this applies also to a lot of academic interaction at more advanced levels, if we stop trying to replicate normal seminar or conference conditions and practices online – the natural response, understandably – and instead focus on what is actually important. Yes, part of me is hoping now for a revival of blogs, or something like blogs; surely, rather than trying to set up synchronous presentations and discussion, with all the now-familiar technical issues (not to mention time zone issues), it makes more sense to have asynchronous online discussion in response to a properly recorded presentation, or at the very least set up a discussion board to follow up on a presentation? What’s with the fetishisation of ‘live’? Committing time to research interactions in the middle of a hectic teaching term is a lot easier when *you* can choose when to interact.
Not least because it’s also then dead easy to scroll past the ‘this is more a comment than a question’ contributions rather than actually having to listen to them in real time…
There’s a persistent view (certainly expressed strongly by critics of universities) that online is by definition inferior. Maybe, for specific things – which are not necessarily the most important things. We can rethink our priorities; we can come up with alternatives and workarounds. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of taking things more slowly; exchanging ideas with someone over a period of time before deciding that it’s worth scheduling a Skype chat to explore collaboration, rather than the conference thing of the now or never, all or nothing post-panel coffee because you may never meet this person again (and where, indeed, you can commit to only one or two people at a time, or have to go with a big group where more focused conversation is difficult if not rude).
We certainly didn’t choose the current circumstances, but every cloud etc.; we can anticipate more ‘slow conferences’, more networking on the basis of interests and expertise rather than just who knows who, more collaborative projects between people who have never met irl – and all of this will be a good thing.
Very interesting, and I pretty much agree. Recently on Twitter, I tweeted a couple of ideas that could by some be considered a bit controversial Someone else had tweeted the same comments, and received a tsunami of abuse – I wanted to see what happened when I did the exact same. Of course, I was a male and she wasn’t, so no people felt the need to come and tell me why I wrong. The main result was that I acquired quite a few new followers, a number of them PGs, so today I tweeted out to tell them my DMs were open. I follow quite a lot of PGs and ECRs, and will follow them back, and if they ask a #ClassicsTwitter question, I don’t think it beneath my dignity to get involved and respond.
Also, LOL at ‘Yes, I know some people will answer B; that’s why we still have Facebook.’
Yes, the difference in responses in such circumstances is astonishing; I didn’t want to ignore that problem, but equally this was intended to *encourage* people to dip their toe in the water… There’s also a lot to be said about the contrast between the level of engagement offered by someone in your position and that of some very well established figures, and what this says about the different sorts of academic hierarchy found on social media.
I rather think my own position is a bit anomalous, and indeed that partly drives how I operate – I don’t have many, if any, formal mentees, so to a degree I go out looking for informal ones through social media (obviously not in a stalkery sorta way). That’s certainly how a lot of my engagements with mid-career scholars started. I’m probably also too directly engaged to analyse how that plays out in hierarchical terms.
That’s precisely my (rather incoherent) point; no, I haven’t done the analysis, but my guess is that some of the most engaged and supportive accounts on Classics Twitter – so those that might rank highly in social media influencer terms – are people who are somewhat marginal or alienated from the dominant centre of things, or who at least feel somewhat alienated and marginal. Which doesn’t stop the conventional academic hierarchy from regularly reasserting itself.
It does help, of course, that a lack of Stupid Admin gives me more time to be engaged with social media. But when I think of people engaged in Twitter, the first name that comes to mind is Liz Gloyn, and she’s definitely not marginal in disciplinary terms. However, she may be an exception, and your wider point may be true.
(Also true – I bet more people would have read this and weighed in if it were a Twitter exchange!)
the de facto standard in the humanities for soliciting group comments on a working paper seems to be academia dot edu, but they are a fly-by-night startup with aggressive claims to anything posted.
Keep in mind that the scholars producing birdsite shaped things on birdsite are the scholars who would be blogging! People only have so much time and the genre requirements of different ways of being on the Internet that being active everywhere is a full-time job. And there are not a lot of paid jobs for Social Media Mananager for the Thucydides Mafia (“make a fatuous cite to the Melian dialogue and find some rude ostraca in your bed”). Expecting people to be everywhere online, especially when most of us don’t have jobs in the field, is not reasonable.
There’s a Thucydides mafia? I thought there was just me, a lonely obsessive working through childhood trauma…
Thanks for this. I’ve boycotted academia dot edu since looking into its business model, so I am a bit disturbed if it is becoming – for want of anything better – the place for online networking and exchange. As for the Twitter – does naming it summon some kind of troll spirit? – I can imagine that some of the people there might otherwise be blogging, but I doubt if that’s true of most of them; maybe they would be commenting on blogs, but as someone who does both I do find they serve radically different needs.
And, yes, it is a time commitment, and it is deeply problematic when people (especially PGRs and ECRs) are expected to do this on top of everything else, but the point of this blog post was that we may have to, simply because some of the things we’re used to doing may not be possible or at least may not be so easy for a while to come. And this does have some positives – not least being more accessible, or less inaccessible, to people who don’t have academic jobs than the traditional conferences, especially the smaller invite-only ones.
One of the many reasons I never got on birdsite was watching bloggers open an account there and within six months vanish from the open Internet and start posting birdsite-shaped things there.
I am also worried that scholars think that putting a PDF on academia dot edu is the way to make it free to read. We know that sites like that vanish or delete or hide or mangle things which just a few nerds cared about: their owners just don’t think like librarians because they are not librarians. Setting up a humanities arXiv would be cheap even by humanities standards but the will does not seem to exist.