In The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media, Emily Hund examines how digital creators seeking work after the 2008 financial crash spawned a multi-billion-dollar industry that has redefined culture, social media and advertisin…
Category: Social Media
Threads may offer users greater flexibility and control, but concerns over privacy are increasingly mainstream
The recent launch of Threads, Meta Platform’s (formerly Facebook) answer to X (formerly Twitter), highlights how social media is undergoing a period of reinvention. However, drawing on a recent study of Meta’s corporate messaging around the launch of t…
Building an alternative to academic twitter relies on centring the experiences of lurkers
As Twitter, now ‘X’, the preferred social media platform for academics, undergoes a period of change, Gina Sipley argues that part of what made the platform and may make new social media platforms attractive to academics, were the benefits it afforded …
Will Threads be the new academic Twitter?
With over a 100 million new users, the launch of Threads has a real potential to unseat Twitter as the default platform for academic social media. Taking stock of Threads, Andy Tattersall, examines the positives and negatives of the platform and sugges…
Beyond the doughnut – Five ways to use altmetrics for academic success
A decade on since their inception, Andy Tattersall considers how academics can make use of altmetrics in ways that go beyond counts and metrics. When the term altmetrics first appeared in September 2010, originating in a Tweet by ImpactStory co-founde…
Book Review: Social Media and Hate by Shakuntala Banaji and Ramnath Bhat
In Social Media and Hate, Shakuntala Banaji and Ramnath Bhat explore the problem of hate speech on social media platforms, offering case studies of India, Brazil, Myanmar and the UK. The book is a timely and insightful exploration of the intersection o…
Social media has changed – Will academics catch up?
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…
Book Review: Not Exactly Lying: Fake News and Fake Journalism in American History by Andie Tucher
In Not Exactly Lying: Fake News and Fake Journalism in American History, Andie Tucher explores how journalistic practice has often pivoted on disinformation throughout US history. This is a first-rate study that will give readers a greater understandin…
2022 in review: Communicating Your Research
Research communication is a moveable feast and as varied as the media and communication channels used to reach an intended audience. This annual review pulls out eleven posts focusing on different aspects of research communication that have been featur…
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…