Social media, academics and the epistomology of knowledge

A while ago I read this interesting presentation on Web 2.0 in academic contexts (teaching, research, libraries) by Lambert Heller when it occurred to me that I have recently adopted a new Web 2.0 tool myself that I am finding increasingly useful: Twitter.

Now I’m perfectly aware that my discovery of Twitter for getting valuable updates from colleagues and keeping in touch (not literally a discovery, of course – I don’t live under a rock -, but in the sense of “I actually want to use that”) comes many years late. But while I was working on my dissertation and other projects, I found that I had a very limited capacity for new technology and not a lot of patience to adjust my medial habits. A microblog is not rocket science from a usage perspective, but when you’re already up to your throat in emails and the schedule is tight, experimentation is generally not too high up on the agenda. That, and I believe that academics in particular are prone to having their share of scruples when it comes to things like Twitter.

Let me use myself as my own test subject for a moment. The time it takes to adapt to a new tool (time that many people in research feel they sorely lack) is one factor. But what is it specifically about (many) academics that causes them to be reluctant about writing a research blog or using a social network for purposes related to work?

Why we (don’t) blog

I’m sure others have already made that point, but many (I daresay most) academics are traditionalists when it comes to new technologies, for several reasons. A central one is how success and failure are determined in academia. In business, a company has to adapt to it’s environment. It has to be well-adjusted to the needs of its stakeholders; it needs to understand the marketplace. It also makes sense to take risks to gain a competitive advantage over others, at least while the reward is worth it.

But things are different at universities and research institutes. The environment in academia – those forces that determine whether what you’re doing is fantastic or mediocre, thoroughly researched or shoddy – are not external forces, but your own peers. There is no true “outside”, which is why we have the metaphor of the ivory tower. Even funding agencies and university administrations ultimately rely on experts from the field. We are constantly evaluating each other via peer review, tenure committees and grant applications. Academic “introversion” – the focus on a specific field of research and the associated community of researchers – happens because we don’t really have to care about anything other than our success inside our discipline, since that success will determine the overall direction of our career – up or down, towards tenure or away from it. Naturally, this makes the individual scholar focus quite narrowly on what his peers are doing and a whole lot less on what the rest of the world deems important. A researcher and his field are the primary constituents in this interaction, while everything else is secondary. In conjunction with the fact that an academic career typically unfolds over a much greater timespan than careers in other areas do, a degree of herd mentality is almost inevitable.

That situation has a profound effect on how academic researchers think and it is the basis for why traditional journal publishing has not been replaced by blogging and twittering over night. Because while the “outside world” is comparatively unimportant in academia, the “inside world” is of pivotal importance. This inside world is shaped by those who have the most influence and power and in science and academia these are generally senior researchers. Your reputation in the eyes of your peers (and especially the major players in your field) is likely to be the most valuable asset to you as a young researcher.

What’s in it for me?

A colleague and friend of mine recently remarked that he didn’t see the use of blogging in an academic context. What do I gain from it in terms of my career? was the question he was asking, and I had to agree with him that there is not very much to be gained from writing about your research as long as your peers aren’t doing it. It’s new!, it’s cool! and everyone is doing it! aren’t really relevant arguments in academia, unless everyone includes those leading the field or colleagues that you want to be in touch with.

Similarly, the idea of reaching more people with your research, for example by putting up preprints of your publications on your website, is only moderately exciting to many researchers. When I urged a well-known linguistics professor to update her department profile page, because it would allow her to reach many more people via search engines – “people who are perhaps completely unfamiliar with your work”, in my words – she responded rather unexpectedly “but do I really want all of those people to be able to find me?”.

Scholarly communication inside of your own discipline and connecting with the general public are two very different issues to most researchers and the first is usually deemed indefinitely more important than the second.

Incentives for using social media in academic contexts

But that doesn’t mean that blogging, microblogging and other froms of social media won’t eventually take off with academics. In fact, I think we’ll see these practices take on a central role in scholarly communication in a matter of several years, maybe a decade. Driving this development will be a combination of cultural and technological factors:

1. The familiarity of today’s student generation with social media in non-professional contexts will make adoption of these technologies in research and academia a natural process as today’s students become tomorrow’s professors.
2. The fact that university administrators and people at funding agencies will also grow increasingly  familiar with blogging and different forms of social media will result in these forms of communication becoming more and more incentivized. Anything that is recognized as a real publication will eventually be used, but while blogging and twittering are still considered to be gray literature, the gain associated with using these forms of publishing is not sufficient.
3. The “death of paper” in academic communication will also spur this development. While the natural sciences already predominately publish digitally, the Humanities and social sciences are lagging to various degrees. Of course much is being published digitally, but very few senior Humanities scholars will object to their work appearing only in print, as long as it’s with a prestigious publisher. Once this shifts to digital resources being the primary form of scholarly communication, further-reaching changes are likely to follow.

Even though paper is on the way out physically, it will take us much longer to get rid of it conceptually. Our model of doing research is to a large extent based on the epistemic stability that paper provides by virtue of its medial characteristics. Because what is printed, bound and stored on library shelves is not mutable, it works to support our interpretation of information being something stable and tangible. What we as researchers say in a casual discussion over coffee, in a presentation at a conference and in a published and peer-reviewed paper are very different things, both in terms of form and content. A research paper addresses the faceless and very artificial audience of the academic public, with no visible speaker and very little personal dimension of expression. This is not a god-given trait – personal correspondence between scholars was the forerunner of today’s academic writing – and the rise of social media, which is all about communication between people, makes in plausible that we will see a movement back into that direction.

Change the practice and the practice changes you

The rapidness of interpersonal communication on the Internet is bound to boost the speed of scientific discourse dramatically, which now, by comparison, seems to take place in slow motion. This is not possible unless not only how we communicate about science changes, but how we do science itself. Projects like OpenWetWare hint at the kind of shift that is likely to occur in the natural sciences – towards a highly collaborative and iterative wiki-style form of investigation. In the social sciences and (especially) the Humanities the paradigm shift towards digitality may be even more fundamental, because publishing itself is such a fundamental part of being a researcher in these disciplines. New methodologies and research questions will merge with new forms of discourse about research in these areas and the changes seem likely to reconfigure profoundly what Humanities as a term will mean in the future.

Perhaps it’s ultimately the sense that incorporating social media tools is bound to reshape how we deal with information and generate knowledge that keeps many academics from doing it.  We have a hard time imagining sometimes that the genres we use in given institutional contexts (education, law, business) are the result of the technology used to create them and that these changes are not the result of a conscious effort, but a natural development that we have little control over.

Me, I’m curious to see what a world full of twittering academics, webcasts, virtual conferences and interactive research papers will be like. Contrary to what some skeptics seem to believe, I suspect it will not be the end of serious research as we know it.