When I started working with Web 1.0, my then advisor told me that someday, every website we created should count as a journal publication.
He curated the websites for government, non-profits, & more on his CV as if they were journal publications.
Unfortunately, design science had not yet caught its stride - so our Web 1.0 work was never written up in a formal way & our lessons learned/theoretical advancements/real-world impact went unnoticed in broader academe.
I wanted a traditional academic career, so I pivoted away from fieldwork & into journal publications.
With the rise of social media, I saw young academics start talking about digital artifacts as scholarship.
I've been told that Twitter, Instagram, Blogs & more are for sharing & disseminating ideas than journal pages. Some have even argued that we should count blogposts on medium.com as if they were conference proceedings.
I advised them, that social media is great, but it's not a fundmental to earning tenure - so do it for intrinsic, not extrinsic reasons.
This was great advice, I thought, until this past year of writing on academic life.
Creating posts requires discipline, careful thought, & a strong moral compass - what you say can cause real harm.
More than that, I suspect it impacts some faculty's lives. This past week, my posts crossed 2 million views & 29k engagements, all in 11 months. I've received dozens of comments from early career scholars about how I'm helping them find their way in academe.
In parallel, a conversation is occurring about impact, & how what we do relates to the world. I know that one could argue that 3000 character posts are not part of that discourse - but I would disagree - 3000 pointed words can change the world.
A good example is this post: https://lnkd.in/echGB9PD
It caused a broader, heated discourse within my discipline, by illustrating a need for a candid conversation about race, gender, class & caste in academe.
I'm actively questioning whether my advice is good. In fact, I'm starting to ask if I'm flat-out wrong & we should start considering how social media conversations contribute to academic life.
As I watched my LinkedIn numbers climb, I recalled the words of my Web 1.0 advisor.
He commented, as we placed citizen help centers online, design election reporting systems, craft conservation websites, & more, that we were creating an infrastructure that would change the world. Rather than writing about e-gov, we were actually creating e-gov.
In retrospect, he was prescient. The projects that he led, and I helped with, changed how people viewed the Web & the world.
Now I wonder, how should we value the impact of social media on the fabric of academe & the world?
I don't have a good answer - I"m all ears.
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