Towards the end of my time in Colorado, I read the first edition of Mark Carrigan’s Social Media for Academics. I remember taking the bus into Denver Public Library, reading the book and planning how I might make better use of social media in my work. I think I already had accounts on twitter and facebook, but I wasn’t making much use of these. And, being honest, I wasn’t really drawn to social media at all. For me, reading the first edition of the book and planning to ‘do more’ was a very typical response of starting something new and unfamiliar: first read a book about it, and then do it. For a short time I was motivated to do more with social media. I started several blogs, I tried to force myself to send a couple of tweets each week, and, probably at the same time as many of my friends and colleagues were trying to spend less time on twitter and facebook, I was resolving to spend more time on social media.
Despite enjoying the first edition of the book and being inspired by it to do more, I quickly reverted to sustained social media inactivity. At heart I’m a shy and private person and I’ve been perfectly happy living largely offline. I don’t like conflict, and I’ve never really felt the urge to ‘share’ the things I’ve been doing. Reflecting on this, especially given the language of sharing, there is perhaps an element of selfishness to this, and almost certainly a false humility. Whenever I have ventured onto social media, I’ve generally struggled to see the point. Catching up with old friends is been a treat to enjoy occasionally over a beer or two, not an everyday activity. Indifference has jostled with outright scepticism: I still have the idea that social media makes people angry, creates divisions, and trivializes grief. Perhaps most significantly, I’ve managed to be relatively successful in my work without needing to use social media. It may well be that I’m part of the last generation of academics that can say that.
The Coronavirus pandemic is changing everything. Stuck working from home, the whole of my professional life seems to have gone online, as does much of my personal life. It seems like there is little choice but to embrace these online communities and the technologies that facilitate them. All our classes, for example, are going online. But where do I start? Luckily some things never change. My response to a new challenge is, as always, to look for a book and read about it first. So I was delighted to find that a second edition of Mark Carrigan’s Social Media for Academics has recently been published. I read a hard copy of the first edition; it seems to be some sort of progress that I ordered the Kindle version of the second edition and read it on my iPad.
While I remember the first edition as being focused more on the technologies themselves and the practicalities of using them, the second edition seems to take more of a theoretical approach (this could just be that my focus last time was more on the practice than the theory, since everything was so new). The second edition opens by saying that if you’re going to use social media effectively (and critically) you need to ask three questions: why do you want to use social media? What do you want to do with it? How will you do this? Working from home has given me the time to write out answers to these questions as I read the book. This proved extremely helpful. Rather than focusing primarily on the how, most of my focus as I read the book was on the why. Why am I wanting to use social media and what am I hoping to achieve by using it?
There is a chapter in the middle of the book on identity and social media, which I found especially useful. If I’m being honest, one of the things that has stood in the way of embracing social media has been the question of identity. Who am I and which parts of my identity do I want to ‘put out there’ on social media? While my identity as an academic is quite strong, other parts are less so. In particular, last time I read the book I was just beginning to explore the possibility of some form of ordained ministry in the Anglican Church; this time I have been accepted for training for self-supporting ministry by the Church of England. One of my motivations for wanting to use social media is to explore what it means to be a Christian environmental historian. While I’m excited by this, I’m also a little wary and I appreciated that Carrigan’s book repeatedly addresses the challenges and potential pitfalls of using social media. It’s important for me to accept that some people might see my religious vocation as undermining my academic reputation.
My plan moving forward is to spend the next three months trying to do more with social media. I hope to maintain two blogs offline: this one, for work and religion related posts, and ‘Food, Culture, Travel’ for everything else. I also intend to spend more time on Twitter and Facebook, and perhaps also on LinkedIn and Academia.edu. In late June, or early July I plan to read through this second edition of Social Media for Academics and ‘go live’ with my two blogs. This may also be a good time for an audit of my online identity.
Religion, Environment, History 