My current concern is about how, in this moment, we can reclaim a sense of the more community-focused elements of how we use social media. We should be taking that seriously in terms of choosing where to spend time and energy in the coming months. I believe Twitter can now be a dangerous place for many academics, particularly if they are from minoritised groups – a very large portion of the academic community. However, the risks involved in doing that have increased with time, and particularly under Elon Musk’s leadership after he sacked the team that monitored and censured hate speech. Although they do not seem immediately compatible – how we talk to people in our academic communities is very different to how we talk to the wider public – there was a porousness to Twitter and an almost osmotic quality where it felt possible to do both at the same time. Firstly, talking and engaging with wider publics secondly, participation in research communities. One of the reasons Twitter was so engrossing for academics was that it combined two very different activities. I believe Twitter can now be a dangerous place for many academics. As a platform, Twitter is very good at incentivising the pursuit of visibility and, since academics are already prone to metricising themselves, academic culture and social media culture have synergised into a quite unpleasant thing over time – a destructive, unhelpful place which many people were increasingly sucked into without a clear sense of why they were there. Research projects have also followed a formulaic pathway to impact where they set up a website and associated Twitter feed as standard.Īs a result, Twitter has been institutionalised in UK HE, but in ways that have progressively undermined the value that the academic community can find in social media. ![]() Individual academics have tended to see Twitter as the default place to have their social media presence. Twitter has been central in UK HE in the sense that it has been seen as the single most important gathering place on social media for academics. ![]() What the demise of Twitter means for academics
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