Since its purchase by Elon Musk last year, Twitter has undergone a series of rapid changes, largely with an eye to making the platform profitable. Considering these developments and those on other platforms, Mark Carrigan, suggests that just as academi…
Category: academic twitter
Leaving Twitter? Musk’s management shows the inevitability of regulation
Reflecting on Twitter’s trajectory under the ownership of Elon Musk, Charlie Beckett, suggests recent events have highlighted both the value of the platform for mass-communication and how pre-existing tensions on the platform are similar to those exper…
Requiem for a Tweet – Is there a future for the academic social capital held on the platform?
As the real possibility of platform death looms for Twitter, Mark Carrigan reflects on the role of the platform as stage for the accumulation of academic social capital and urges academics, learned societies, funders and those involved in the field of …
Academics can easily leave Twitter’s town square, but it will be much harder for their institutions
The fate of Twitter, both for academics and everyone else, has been a pressing issue in the past weeks. In this post Andy Tattersall argues that whilst individual academics could quite easily leave the platform, the centrality of Twitter to academic in…
As Musk takes control are we heading to an ‘everything app’ or the break-up of academic twitter?
After much speculation, Twitter has been acquired by Elon Musk. In this post, Mark Carrigan asks, if now is the time to rethink academic twitter by separating out the knowledge exchange and academic community building functions that have up to this poi…
Aphorism and twitter – A distinct medium for constructing knowledge
Twitter can be written off as a distinctly unserious medium, a place for fads, bullying and the latest cat videos. However, as Steve Fuller discusses the unique format of a tweet can also be a space for concision, constructive ambiguity as well as a te…
Leave, Adapt, Resist – Time to rethink Academic Twitter?
As Twitter moves to become a private company owned by the billionaire Elon Musk, Mark Carrigan, reflects on the increasing importance academic social media and academic twitter has secured in universities for building academic communities and for publi…
Using Twitter as a data source an overview of social media research tools (2021)
In this edition of Wasim Ahmed’s long-running series on using Twitter data as a research tool, Wasim considers the significance of the newly introduced Twitter ‘academic research product track’ and the different ways in which Twitter …
Sonia Livingstone on launching a book in lockdown: “I’m almost to the point of thinking it is better this way”
Professor Sonia Livingstone has published extensively in her field of Social Psychology. However, when COVID-19 disrupted academic life, she had to rethink the planned book launch for her most recent book, Parenting for a Digital Future. In this Q&A, Professor Livingstone outlines the ways that the pandemic has transformed the process of promoting a book,. She discusses … Continued
Equipping PhD researchers for social media success
Social media is increasingly recognised as an important feature of academic life and institutions are investing in training sessions to help doctoral students towards this. However, what this training consists of, and how sessions are best run is less clear. In this post, Mark Carrigan and Ana Isabel Canhoto share their experience of designing and … Continued