When I first inaugurated this blog, way, way back in the salad days of early 2010, I had a fair range of ideas about why I was doing it. Partly, I thought, it would be a platform on which I could work through ideas, and perhaps tease out conceptual and theoretical questions that I was confronting. Or, a little less ambitiously perhaps, I thought it might simply be a way to mark my tracks, to have a sort of academic journal. Indeed, I was keen to mix the personal and professional to a degree, and have a place where I could write about thoughts, impressions and perceptions from the position of everyday academic life. None of this is to say, of course, that another reason for the blog was simply as a means to have my name out there: I’m not sure how open most academics would be on such a point, but this is surely a major reason for starting a blog, particularly for early-career academics.

I realise some of the above reasons may sound a little indulgent, but these are the main reasons I had for starting this blog. Today, I still value this blog, though I tend to consider it as more of a dynamic ‘home’ on the net. Yes, I still do use this as a place to register occasional thoughts, points of view, even ‘reportage’ of sorts, usually related in one way or another to research-related sightings or events . But really, it largely functions as my main non-institutional website.

Why this partial drift from the blog? Partly, I’ve found it difficult, even an annoyance, to keep up with good quality posts, at least without the nagging feeling that time would be better spent working on ‘proper’ publications. I’d like to add that I worry too about critiques of academic blogs often becoming platforms for self-indulgent narcissism. But the truth is, this has never stopped me from, for example, announcing news of publications, as I did in the previous post (I realise it’s probably an overstatement to call this narcissism, but the point remains).

Yet there is a more likely reason that I have drifted from myopic blog-writing, I think. It is that, along with many academics, I’ve spent a lot more time on various social media platforms. In particular, of course, Twitter: it’s a social platform which certainly has weaknesses but also is, well, addictive for someone who wants to keep up with points of view and interesting news and events. But I’m now on other platforms too, such as Linkedin, partly since many subjects of my research are on it, and partly as it helps to have professional journalists as contacts, given that I direct a journalism BA programme. Like many academics, I’ve joined Academia.edu too, I think because someone asked once at a conference if I was on it, after which I almost unthinkingly joined it, uploading papers and dutifully filling in personal details. Facebook is perhaps the strangest of all. At one time it was a social space near-exclusively for my family, friends and social acquaintances. But in the past couple of years, increasingly I’ve added many academic ‘friends’ into the mix. This has created what danah boyd calls the ‘context collapse’ built into the architectures of many social networking platforms. Now that my Twitter posts automatically appear on my Facebook wall (and also by blog posts, since those automatically post to Twitter) the effect has deepened to a point that, for example, my father commented on my previous blog post (about a new publication) that ‘we’ll all read it next week when we meet in San Diego’ (jokingly, I think, and hope).

Though I could continue thinking through these developments by reflecting on my personal and professional curiosities and concerns, I’d like to step back at this point and consider some of the deeper issues at stake.

Recent debates about academic uses of ‘new’ media have sometimes seemed to make problematic assumptions. In a series of debates on the UK-based left geography listserv CRIT-GEOG-FORUM, some critics seemed to regard various uses of blogging or social media as ‘virtual’ spaces, apart from the ‘real’ academic world (whether this real world was meant to be for serious scholarship or serious activism). Countervailing views were often a little too seduced by the ‘new’ of new media; that is, that new equals progress or even that new equals better; that we have left the old for the new.

However, I’d suggest we start by thinking of digital and networked media not in terms of old/new or real/virtual but instead as academic environments. We could begin by drawing an analogy to the physical environment of a academic department. University buildings are both a crystallisation of expectations and aspirations for academic conduct (teaching, seminars, desk work, lab work, experiments, administration, etc), and at the same time, in that crystallisation, shape how academics go about what they do. Academic journals might be seen as an environment not so much constituted by a physical space but through the concatenation of texts over time (a la Michael Warner’s definition of public). The practices which surround the production, circulation and consumption of journals are both a crystallisation of what editors, authors, production staff, etc do, but journals are also a form which guides various practices of academic knowledge production. In a way, we might draw similar analogies about the physical and dispersed spaces which go into holding and organising the AAG Annual Meeting.

In certain senses, emergent digital and networked media are not that different, in that they afford certain architectures, which provide environments for interaction and engagement. In her recent book, How We Think, N. Katherine Hayles sees digital environments as part of a long line of media helping to constitute our ways of thinking: her opening premise is ‘that we think through, with and alongside media’ (p. 1. This is a familiar premise in media theory; Hayles mentions McLuhan, Kittler, Manovich and Hansen). For Hayles, media (or more generally technics) are basic conditions of human thinking, and cannot simply be ignored, or argued or wished away.

But to say digital and networked media are ‘just another environment’ would understate the real significance of technological changes related to digital computation, which are widely considered to be at least as significant as the print revolution if not more so. The replicability, mutability, persistence, retrievability and scale of digital and networked media allow for distinct phenomological conditions for experiencing the academic field and particular subfields such as geography. Hayles makes a helpful contrast in this context between ‘deep’ and ‘hyper’ attention as cognitive styles. She suggests that the generation of academics nurtured in print environments prefer ‘deep attention’, which is characterized by concentrating on a single object for long periods of time (e.g. classically, a printed work of literature), ignoring outside stimuli and tolerating a long periods of focus. By contrast, hyper attention, which is particularly pronounced amongst younger students, is a cognitive style characterized by switching focus rapidly between different tasks, a preference for multiple information streams, high levels of stimulation, and a low tolerance for boredom. The competition between these two styles is demonstrated, Hayles argues, by the new visibility of those media-related practices which do still surround print; i.e. that they can no longer be simply taken for granted or seen as the natural domain of scholarship or knowledge.

Though such talk of ‘cognitive styles’ refers directly to the ways in which neural circuitry is being ‘rewired’ and ‘repurposed’ through interaction with digital interfaces, Hayles emphasis is firmly on the embodied dimensions of thinking. For her, cognition isn’t just psychological but physical: keyboards, touch screens, the indeed the Twitter news feed can be thought of in terms of how cognitive processes are distributed across an extended network of technologies.

If we return, then, to academics uses of social media, we might think of digital and networked environments as presenting new conditions of possibility not just for how academics think, but also what academics can do and say. Here I am drawing on what are for me some very well-worn ideas of ‘practice theory’. Though the implications of social media for the academic ‘rules of the game’ are still noticed relatively often, they are increasingly becoming the taken-for-granted environments for academic conduct and communication. There are many different implications to these environments. It’s more than simply, for instance, Twitter’s 140 characters bringing about a fragmentation of writing per se. Writing is also increasingly blurred with other mediums (image, moving image, sound, symbol, etc), audience assumptions are hyper-complexified, and authorship itself is less and less stable (for good or bad). These shifts add up, I think, not only to changes in the shared understandings academics have of our common situation, but also to what Schatzki might call the teleoffective structuring of academia. That is, academics’ affective sensings of and normative claims to their purposes and their ends.

This ‘shift’ – if we want to call it that – will certainly unfold in uneven and geographically specific ways. And there is a need to be cautious and critical of what Evgeny Morozov identifies as distinctively Western forms of ‘internet centrism’ (i.e. all social change will now happen through or due to the internet), ‘cyber-utopianism’ (i.e. a failure to see any dark side to the internet) and ‘solutionism’ (i.e. a compulsion to create technological ‘solutions’ for nonexistent problems). But contemporary social media are becoming less and less tools that academics can opt out of. Rather, they increasingly comprise the basic environments of academic practice, and at a time of shifting priorities in higher education, these are environments academics need to claim.

This blog post was written (in haste…) in place of a contribution at the AAG 2013 panel ‘Between freedom and narcissism? New media, academic identities and circuits of knowledge production’ which I organised with Birkbeck colleague Rosie Cox. I was rather under the weather leading up to and on the day of the panel, so I wrote this in advance as a substitute for my contribution – though I still attended the panel and even rather foolishly made a failed attempt to foggily contribute (I had to apologetically stop halfway, just before the theory bit above). So, this stands as representative of what I might have said under better conditions.