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…
Category: Social Media
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…
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…
An introvert’s guide to academic networking and hybrid events
As academic conferences and events re-emerge after a period of COVID-19 induced absence, Mark Carrigan, takes stock of the new post-pandemic world of academic meetings and provides four strategies for how academics can productively navigate and build n…
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…