This Thursday 2nd May from 12.30-2.00pm I will be giving a seminar for the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research (BISR) on ‘The networked academic: social media and your research identity’. It is part of BISR’s ‘Developing Your Research Career’ seminar series, and will comprise both a (partial) survey of various social media platforms currently being used by academics, along with a deeper look at what might be at stake in the academic fields’ relatively rapid immersion in social media environments. The latter bit relates, in part, to my recent blog post on social media as academic environments.

The seminar details and abstract are below.

Birkbeck Institute for Social Research

The Networked Academic: Social Media and your Research Identity
Thursday 2nd May 12.30 – 2pm Room B35, Main Building
Speaker: Scott Rodgers (Department of Media and Cultural Studies, Birkbeck)

This seminar considers the ways in which academics are increasingly using and connecting through various social networking platforms. In addition to surveying the growing range of platforms – from Facebook to Twitter and beyond – we will also ‘scratch below the surface’ and consider some of the deeper issues at stake in academics’ uses of and exposure to social media environments. On the one hand, we’ll consider how such new technologies and practices potentially undermine academia’s basic ‘rules of the game’ by placing a premium on novelty, quirkiness, abundance and the ephemeral, which destabilises established scholarly standards around originality, authorship and publication. On the other hand, we’ll consider arguments that the rules of the game are not at all being undermined, but rather shifted in progressive new directions, with academic identities and knowledge production potentially becoming more distributed, collaborative, transparent and honest.

Open to all – no registration