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In higher education today, the intersection of digital technologies and changing work conditions creates intersecting, well-documented trends towards massive course experimentation, shifting funding structures, teaching precarity, and TEDtalk celebrity on the speaking circuit. Against this backdrop, the roles of academics and scholars within the larger public sphere are changing (Siemens, 2008). One way in which scholars navigate these shifts is by forging identities via online networks (Veletsianos, 2013): by building reputations and networks as scholars within the new, open, online public sphere. This paper posits that blogging and social media participation constitute a new indicator of academic influence, both within networked circles and beyond, creating visibility and reputation that funders and media may recognize. But what kinds of identity positions count as influential, credible, and valuable within networked participatory scholarship? How do scholars “read” each other’s signals in this complex new public sphere?
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Reading each other in networks: Perspectives on profiles & influence
Bonnie Stewart University of Prince Edward Island
#smsociety14
Networked Scholarship
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Networks & institutions are both reputational economies
Those within the academy become
very skilled at judging the stuff of reputations. Where has the person’s work been published,
what claims of priority in discovery have they established,
how often have they been cited, how and where reviewed, what prizes won, what
institutional ties earned, what organizations led?
Willinsky, J. (2010)
We read each other
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The study
• ethnography • 14 (13) participants, 8 exemplars
• 3 months of participant observation on Twitter & blogs • 10 interviews
Why Twitter?
Lupton, D.A. (2014)
Immersion required
Reading profiles
Primary logics for engagement
• 9/10 - Connection • 7/10 - Collaboration • 4/10 – Amplification • 5/10 - Dissemination • 10/10 - Contribution
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Is it just a numbers game?
“Sometimes…I’ll choose someone with twenty followers, because I come across something they’ve
managed to say in 140 characters and I think… “oh, look at you crafting
on a grain of rice.”
- @katemfd
Networked practice as a way of being
Key: Shared Interests
Key: Institutional status
“People willing to put any institutional info up
make me more inclined to follow…I find relative safety in people who are clearly on Twitter as themselves as academic-y types and…aren’t likely to be jerks without outing
themselves as jerks who work in specific places. ”
- @exhaust_fumes
Key: Discipline
Key: Shared Circles
“I ‘discover’ new people to follow when someone RTs their tweets, or when someone
starts to follow me…I look at a recent history: if their tweets are RTd by someone I have respect
for AND I find the tweet to have some oomph, then I will start to
follow them.”
- @14prinsp
Key: Visuals
“I check their twitter profile, read recent
tweets, check out their blog or web site… I try to follow folks who have differing views
or from differing backgrounds to reduce the echo chamber. I rarely follow anyone who
has an egg image and no profile info, though, unless I know them already.”
- @miken_bu
Elephant in the room: Scale
Networks offer voice & influence BUT…
power relations affect how voices are heard
“It’s the New York Times and the Chronicle of
Higher Ed…I get emails from my Dean when I show up there. I’ve got a talk coming up
at Duke, and the person who invited me mentioned that Chronicle article three times. It’s a form of legitimacy. It shows up in their
office and so they think it’s important.”
- @tressiemcphd
What matters most = capacity for meaningful contribution
BUT.
Twitter is becoming institutionalized…
