Digital Pedagogy Identity Networks & Scholarship

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Natalie

Social Media and the Old Fashioned Listserv

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Today I’m reflecting on the faculty listserv. Not to worry – I won’t re-hash an internal controversy in a public space, but the juxtaposition of the old-fashioned listserv and the new digital forms of engagement that we are thinking through in this forum is making a few things apparent to me.

  1. Old fashioned thinkers use old fashioned media and I don’t want to be one of them. We are having a conversation about gender equity on twitter. It feels like its been going on forever – years at least. Words like “mansplaining” and “himterrupt” are commonplace and understood, even though they are not in Webster’s Dictionary. I’m on twitter, and I honestly thought everyone in the whole world was familiar with these ideas – even though the same people that think climate change, reproductive justice, and gun laws are a-ok also think the behavior is fine and in some sort of service to the cosmic order of things. Turns out, no. On the listserv people say really well-intentioned things that make it obvious that none of these ideas had ever even occurred to them. Not a single time. SMH.
  2. The public is as big as the technology allows it to be. Twitter has been around for 10 years and has 974 million members. The listserv has probably been active for at least twice that long in some form or another, and has exactly 226 members (I just looked). Writing on both is considered “being in public.” I am thinking this through metaphorically. If my public is 1/8 of the world’s population, and your public is 226 people who live and work in the same place as you do, we have very different ideas of what constitutes engagement. And our scholarship is probably very different. But really, its the way we see the world that is different. If I have a digital presence, then my ideas must past muster with the world’s conversation. If I don’t, I have the listserv.
  3. Someone who I know on twitter and on the listserv impressed me on the listserv. This is an ally. On twitter. I don’t always know that that transfers to real life. I can’t particularly think of examples in which people that seemed like allies in the cyberworld were enemies in the real one – but sometimes people’s avatars are more opinionated than they themselves are. But the listserv feels like this in between place. And when this person made a listserv point that completely mirrored the point they would have made on twitter, I was super pleased. And I felt like having the digital presence cemented the ally identity so that it was more likely to appear on the listserv. But what of people that only have the listserv?

Anyway, I’m really glad I was in this class. Because none of the things above would have been visible to me if I wasn’t reflecting on the relationship between digital and real life at the same time.

Reflecting on the role of twitter in my professional life

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StrangerBookCoverI have a few thoughts regarding what it means to be a sociology professor in 2017 – many of them involve public life and some of them involve Twitter.

  • If we believe, as we teach and as our research demands, that the social matters, then it follows that issues of injustice and oppression can be corrected if we can make the social context a just one.
  • If we as sociologists know that, then we have a responsibility to make our scholarship known in the public sphere, where it can effect the social context. We can do this both in the classroom and through engagement with public scholarship, including blogs, facebook, opinion pieces, and twitter.
  • But while we have this responsibility to engage, we do not have systematic backing from our institutions (which want us to be known, but only in a positive light) and so our we are not just talking about online danger – but danger to our livelihoods should the public engagement go awry.

So I am a participant in the twitterverse, but in a way that feels really ginger.

  • I definitely maintain ties to a broad network of colleagues, activists, and former and current students online. I don’t think that I would be able to keep up with all the veteran students if it weren’t for twitter, and I would really miss that. I would also miss opportunities to be known in my field were it not for that identity.
  • But I also feel like I tweet and re-tweet while looking over my shoulder – which I don’t appreciate.
  • I try to use my twitter personality to bridge the personal-political divide. I am not a cog in the corporate higher ed machine, and I feel my timeline reflects that, but I’m still not 100% certain that its worth the anxiety.

Residente y Visitante

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I did my Visitor-Resident post:

So now, of course, because these are named after the super-famous, super-political Calle 13 duo, I’m obsessing over whether I really want to be a resident at all. If you are merely granted access to a space someone else owns and controls, what use is it to be a resident? Perhaps acknowledging that we visit those spaces that are interesting and helpful to us in a given moment, without taking any ownership of them, is a better paradigm than Residente’s omnipotent anger at his fundamental powerlessness. I put Facebook and Twitter furthest to that side – because I am able to use those platforms comfortably. But this resident paradigm gives me the illusion that I somehow belong in them, even though they don’t belong to me and I don’t have any control over even my experience in them, nevermind my students’. And, really, is it appropriate to invite students to your home if you can’t control what happens to them there?

I don’t know about the Home/Work, Personal/Professional dichotomy. I thought I did, but the readings problematized this in a way I haven’t processed yet.

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