Week 3: Social Media, “Serious Academic Discussion,” and Compulsory Use in the Classroom

Any digital tool or platform that allows for an exchange to take place (whether it is a social exchange, an exchange of data, the sharing of research etc.) has the potential to facilitate “collaborative scholarly work.” We spent much of last class discussing the inadequacies of certain social media sites and how frankly, most attempts to co-opt them for scholarly use can read as unproductive or contrived in some way. I have been considering this question over the last few days and am not sure I have fully fleshed out how to combat my skepticism towards social media and academic practice. Rather than allowing my ambivalence to limit the potential relationships that might exist in the intersection between the two, I’ve tried to reconsider these sites and services in a more charitable, optimistic, and productive light. Below I have listed several social media platforms and the ways in which they might benefit a collaborative, academic exchange:

Week 4: Internet Social Space for Scholastic Socializing: The Highs and Lows of Facebook and Twitter for the Academic Discussion

In my own experiences, Facebook has been a benefit for my scholarly pursuits due to its ability to a) create groups dedicated to something, which allows for a variety of options (to be discussed), b) can be as open or exclusive as one would wish (I.e. We used them for group projects and instant messaging brainstorming with around 10 people, more or less in my own experience), and c) the archiving aspect of Facebook is, I would argue, easy to search through than Twitter (turning to Twitter due to our discussion the other day in which I shared that it was difficult for me to follow along and others agreed), whereas Facebook allows for you to search within the group/within Facebook in general. 
I’d like to break down the options of what Facebook does allow: it now allows for longer posts, and longer replies, creating a space for a richer discussion, one that can be as long as you need to express, divulge, or create your scholarly work. It is intuitive with the use of links, allowing for copy paste functions (without again the loss/confusing search of Twitter in my opinion, nor the loss of space to post). Facebook allows you to upload whole files and share them, much like a Google Drive account, but instead of having to seek out and select all of the email addresses of the Facebook group that you would like to share to through Google, Facebook instantly uploads to the group, from which you can instead edit out those whom you do not wish to see it, if that be the case.  Facebook allows polls with real feedback ability, of both numbers and opinions; it promotes the use of links, sharing, photographs, memes, gifs, YouTube videos quickly and easily.

Week 4: Social Media as Digital Platform for Academics

1. It is difficult for me to conceive of Twitter as a place for meaningful academic work mainly because of my issues with fragmentation, character limits, and difficulty in readability (it’s simply hard to follow). In this way, the forum inevitably causes conversation, brainstorming, workshopping, and feedback to be brief and most of all, as Dr. Ryan said, ephemeral. Where I do see potential in Twitter, is in the promotion of other forums, articles, or blogs. Twitter is a great place to share a link of an article or blog post to an audience of people in your field who may be interested. For instance, if I was to come across some interesting artifact relating to Wendy Coleman at the Southern California Library, and were to digitize it, this would be a fantastic digital piece to share via Twitter with a professor at UPENN I heard present on Wendy Coleman’s poetry last year. In fact, Twitter could be a great place to share links to what we do end up digitizing from the Southern California Library with other Scholars interested in Watts, as well as with community members in South Central LA. The accessibility of Twitter is open to everyone and it’s a platform that reaches beyond academia, which serves to reach larger audiences. Because the this digital archiving project already has the aim of accessibility and the goal of making information available – Twitter might be a great way of getting that information out there. 

¶ Week 4: Question

Address all of the following prompts and please let us know if you have questions:

1.) Yesterday we explored the possibility of repurposing online social networking services (but also online platforms more generally) for academic/scholarly work. We also talked about some of the hazards and limits of these kinds of endeavors.

Consider one of the services we discussed (Twitter) or another service/platform that you are familiar with (Facebook; Genius; Pintrest). (Set aside for the moment blogging services like WordPress and Tumblr). Do these sites/services have any capacities or affordances that could be harnessed for collaborative scholarly work? This could be work that results in permanent content or a permanent archive. Or it could be more ephemeral group work: brainstorming, sharing feedback, workshopping.