Reporting on their qualitative research into the online abuse faced by science journalists in the USA, Lisa Palmer and Silvio Waisbord, find an uptick in the online harassment of science journalists alongside a lack of institutional support, especially…
Category: Social Media
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…
Are personal academic blogs a thing of the past?
The personal blog was a defining feature of the early internet and there are still a number of high-profile academic blogs studiously maintained by lone scholars. However, for researchers new to academic blogging, is it still worth setting up your own …
Want to make your research credible online? Image matters
Whether it is via videos, blogs, social media, or mainstream news outlets, research findings are communicated in many formats and media other than the traditional research article. However, especially when they are divorced from standard markers of aca…
Mobilising Historical Knowledge without Master Narratives: How historians are correcting the record in a complicated political moment
Across the world and particularly in the USA, historical evidence has become increasingly central to certain contemporary political and policy debates. Drawing on a survey of US media sources, Dustin Hornbeck and Joel Malin, discuss this trend and desc…
Book Review: Social Media and the Automatic Production of Memory: Classification, Ranking and the Sorting of the Past by Ben Jacobsen and David Beer
In Social Media and the Automatic Production of Memory: Classification, Ranking and the Sorting of the Past, Ben Jacobsen and David Beer explore how social media platforms are reshaping our processes of memory-making, with algorithms increasingly deter…
Book Review: The Public and their Platforms: Public Sociology in an Era of Social Media by Mark Carrigan and Lambros Fatsis
In The Public and their Platforms: Public Sociology in an Era of Social Media, Mark Carrigan and Lambros Fatsis explore the discipline of sociology at a time when public life is increasingly shaped by social media platforms. Published in the context of…
As social media classify and rank our ‘memories’, what will this mean for the way we remember?
There are few things more intimately personal than our memories. However, as more of human experience becomes mediated through social media, memories have become a significant resource for social media companies to exploit. Drawing on their new book So…
Book Review: The Crowdsourced Panopticon: Conformity and Control on Social Media by Jeremy Weissman
In The Crowdsourced Panopticon: Conformity and Control on Social Media, Jeremy Weissman explores the role of ‘peer-to-peer’ surveillance through social media and how this is increasingly shaping our behaviour. This is a welcome addition to the scholarl…
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 …