A focus on how individual academics can benefit from social media neglects their crucial role in building new communities and audiences.

That is the argument of Mark Carrigan, a research associate in the University of Cambridge¡¯s Faculty of Education. Many scholars, he claimed, were ¡°ill-equipped to deal with the pitfalls of platforms which effectively seek to manipulate their users¡­We may think we are countering falsehoods or introducing seriousness into the debate, but if we do so in a scattergun, disorganised fashion, we are just adding to the cacophony of platforms [such as Twitter].¡± Far better was to ¡°find ways for academics to collectively use platforms rather than individually be used by them¡±.

Dr Carrigan explores such themes in? (University of Bristol Press), co-written with Lambros Fatsis, a lecturer in criminology at the University of Brighton.

The real value of social media for academics, he told?Times Higher Education,?was in ¡°building sustained relationships with journalists, policymakers, charity staff and activists¡±. Video series on YouTube, podcasts or blogs in online magazines might individually attract limited numbers of people, but together they made up ¡°a really vibrant publishing space¡± with a huge cumulative audience and now formed ¡°a major part of how academia is engaging with the wider world¡±.

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While there was clearly a place for academics to use social media as what his book describes as ¡°nonsense filters¡± and ¡°conduits for nuance¡±, Dr Carrigan urged them to do so carefully and collectively.

When individual academics ¡°got sucked into exchanges on issues of scientific fact¡±, he suggested, they often sounded ¡°haughty and distant. They can approach online interactions as if their expertise ought to be recognised, as if they have a special right to speak compared to other citizens.

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¡°Any platform can be used in scholarly ways,¡± Dr Carrigan added, citing the ways that visual sociologists and anthropologists had taken to Instagram. The key was to avoid the pitfalls that manufacturers¡¯ commercial imperatives have built into them.

Twitter, for example, ¡°incentivises polemic¡± and while Dr Carrigan understood the impulse for academics to ¡°tweet out frustrated responses¡± to ill-informed comments, he urged them to be ¡°much more strategic about how they act on that impulse¡±. A more promising option was ¡°a podcast series that looks at common myths circulating about a topic and goes into more detail about them¡±.

Twitter?threads?could also be used effectively to ¡°slow down conversations and give a record of where current research is at¡± on topics such as epidemiology or the fine print of the Brexit negotiations.

¡°If you get into an angry exchange with the person who shouts the loudest,¡± Dr Carrigan pointed out, ¡°you are missing out on the people who are much less outspoken but might be more interested and more amenable to what you are saying.¡±

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matthew.reisz@timeshighereducation.com