Tag: social media
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Establishing a lasting online academic presence
Establishing an online academic profile involves three levels of engagement: immediate visibility through social media, sustainable medium-impact contributions via personal websites, and enduring impact through research and innovative outputs. Building a strong online presence requires owning a personal website to share ideas across all levels, emphasising the importance of wide and open sharing.
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This App May Indicate Something Is Deeply Wrong with Us
This App May Indicate Something Is Deeply Wrong with Us There’s a new social media app. It’s sort of like Twitter, it’s free, and everyone who signs up for it immediately has—I kid you not—one million followers. And they’re all hanging on your every word, eager to talk about every post you make on it.…
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We don’t need global-level conversation platforms
Instead of more sessions on how to use Twitter to build community (a conversation that’s been going since Twitter launched), I would have liked to see more thoughtful and critical discussion around the use of social media for HPE at the AMEE conference. For example, this piece by Cal Newport, where he questions the idea…
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Using social media to build learning communities
I was in a session earlier where one participant asked about the inevitable disintegration of social media platforms, and how the #AcademicTwitter / #MedEd social media communities might respond. I thought it was a good question, although I was skeptical about much of the conversation that followed. The consensus seemed to be that social media…
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Link: Scientists cutting back on Twitter
in Note“A Nature survey reveals scientists’ reasons for leaving the social-media platform now known as X, and what they are doing to build and maintain a sense of community.” https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02554-0
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A thought on Meta’s Threads
https://startupy.substack.com/p/things-im-thinking-about-67f I think Zuckerberg will be able to build another money making machine with Threads. But alas, this is not the feel good internet I was looking for. More endless scrolling, chipping away at my capacity for concentration. More people incentivized to churn out loads of content to please an algorithm. More user-friendly sameness. More…
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‘Academic writing’ includes more than we think
https://patthomson.net/2023/07/10/academic-writing-its-a-lot/ When we talk about academic writing, as usually refer to papers, books, chapters and dissertations. However, there’s a lot more to academic writing than just these four.
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Where does value accrue?
I went down a bit of a rabbit hole this morning, following a few links that started with a post from Inger Mewburn that caught my attention: The enshittification of academic social media. Telling academics they can achieve career success by using today’s algorithmic-driven platforms is like telling Millennials they could afford to buy a…
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I can’t access tweets or Twitter accounts
Update: I just saw this TechCrunch article with the headline: “Twitter now requires an account to view tweets”. However, there’s been no official announcement from Twitter, so maybe it’s a technical error. Over the past couple of days, I’ve noticed that every time I’ve tried to access a tweet or Twitter account, I get redirected…
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A glorified vector of capital accumulation…
Great quote that reflects how I’ve felt about social media for a long time. Granted, I got a lot of value in the early days of Twitter and other platforms. But, as that value decreased, I found myself resenting the time I felt I had to spend there.
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Collective action problems…
Doctorow, C. (2022). How to leave dying social media platforms. Medium. They had a collective action problem. Each of them could figure out what worked best for them, but getting together to decide what was best for all of them was literally impossible… . Online, a lot of us have been unhappy with our social…
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Weekly digest (17-23 Apr 2023)
Social mediaI had thought that deleting my Twitter account (and also my two Mastodon accounts) would be harder than it ended up being. Even though it’s something I’ve been considering for a long time, I’ve struggled with the idea of deleting more than 10 000 posts that I’ve created over more than a decade. But…
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Twitter is a lost cause for academics…
This platform is a lost cause for academics. Social platforms have become integral to the research infrastructure in a way analogous to conferences, workshops and seminars. Universities and funders need to take responsibility for the upcoming transition rather than outsourcing it to private firms. If you’re committed to using Twitter for external engagement then only…
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I deleted my Twitter account
I deleted my Twitter account about a week ago, but I’ve waited a bit to see if I regretted the decision. There’s a 30-day cooling off period and I didn’t want to write this post, then realise that I’d made a mistake, and recover the account. But the fact is, I don’t miss it at…
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Playing around with Mastodon
I created a profile on Mastodon in 2019, but haven’t done anything with it. I’d check in every now and again to see how the platform was developing and, while I was always intrigued with the notion of an open source microblogging ecosystem, it never really captured my attention. So for a while now, it’s…
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On changing my opinions
I wouldn’t usually listen to an interview with Mark Zuckerberg but three things changed my mind: This particular interview was recommended by someone who’s opinion I value. Lex Fridman is an excellent interviewer and I generally enjoy the conversations he has with guests. I’ve recently come to question the narratives presented by mainstream media. The…
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Social media and performance art
When we go online, we are programmed to react to engagement triggers — likes, shares, retweets, hearts, and thumb-ups. Social and this addiction of audience have made us addicted to something even harder to give up once tasted: a constant feeling of self-importance.
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Learning communities and the problems that matter
Social media platforms are currently based on mass audience models that leverage network effects – you go there because that’s where everyone else is. But I don’t think that this mass audience model is useful anymore, especially if you’re interested in working on important problems. In this new model, users don’t want to connect with…
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Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier – review
His most dispiriting observations are those about what social media does to politics – biased, “not towards the left or right, but downwards”. If triggering emotions is the highest prize, and negative emotions are easier to trigger, how could social media not make you sad? If your consumption of content is tailored by near limitless…
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AI Can Now Identify Racist Code Words on Social Media
“We essentially gathered hateful tweets and used language processing to find the other terms that were associated with such messages… We learned these terms and used them as the bridge to new terms—as long as we have those words, we have a link to anything they can come up with.” This defeats attempts to conceal…