Hi world!
Finally have I had a chance to sit down and write my reflections regarding Topic 1, where we discussed online participation and digital literacies. The videos and the webinar with Dave White were extremely insightful as they prompted me to ponder about my digital presence in a theoretical and more structured way. Having drawn a matrix of my digital presence, I have realized that it actually reflects my consciously made choices, even though I have not thought about them in such an organised way.
I clearly separate the use of digital platforms for personal or professional purposes and try not to mix them up as this distinction also helps me to draw a line between my personal and professional life in order to maintain a healthy work-life balance. Several years ago I stopped actively using social media in my personal life as I found it exhausting to make posts online all the time and completely lost interest in exposing my private life to the world. Moreover, I have always had security concerns about sharing my life events with the people I do not know so that choice was a logical conclusion I came to after a couple of years of exploring the functionality of social media. So when it comes to my personal use of digital tools, I purposefully prefer a ‘visitor’ mode as I am not interested in leaving any social trace in that regard. When it comes to my institutional/professional use of digital space, however, I prefer to be a ‘resident’ and try to actively use the platforms, that I prefer, to ‘promote’ my research and spread the word about research activities that I am part of. I intentionally chose this mode of participation online approximately two years ago as I have realised that as a researcher one needs to actively show the world what one is actually doing, while being silent about your academic endeavours will not do you or the world any good. It happens quite often that there is a lot of interesting research going on within one’s own institution and we do not know what our colleagues are doing/what great opportunities for collaboration/getting and giving advice etc there are within an arm’s reach. I personally think that it is a pity that a lot of potential is lost due to lack of proper communication to both academia and general public and try to combat this issue by ensuring that my research profile is visible and accessible online.
Stay tuned!:)
Alastair Creelman
You seem to have a very sound approach to your digital footprints and have found a good balance. I still think that academics are generally too invisible in society with publications hidden behind paywalls. There is so much disinformation and dangerous lies being spread today that the academic world needs to be much more vocal in its defence of science and research-based information. We need to be better at disseminating research in easily digested forms as well as in scientific papers.
Anna Zemskova
Thank you, Alastair! I agree, I think we as academics need to be more active in the digital arena and learn to communicate our research properly to the public. This is a way forward if we would like to address the challenges that anti-science, pseudoscience and disinformation pose to our society.
Lars Harrysson
Keeping things apart can be good and you seem to keep the private – professional divide clear. But, I would argue that they develop along each other, but while the professional side becomes practical evolution, the private is of a more intellectual sort where issues of what is fair to share and to whom is sent forward. As Alastair raises there is a crucial need for upholding a knowledge based Internet, even outside of our narrow academic comfort zone. So, how do we make what we do more popularized to challenge conspiracies, nonsense and AI-generated fakes? Perhaps you get on to that in your next post on openness …. We’ll see and you decide :-).