Response to 'Is Social Media Antithetical to Academic Life?'
Monday, May 11, 2026 at 12:13PM What follows is my response to 'Spetacularisation, Ephemerality and Narcissism – Is Social Media Antithetical to Academic Life?', by Fernando Viannam, Rafael Alcadipani and Isleide Arruda Fontenelle, published on the LSE Impact blog, May 6th, 2026:
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Fernando, Rafael and Isleide,
You argue powerfully that the idea that social media is essential to academic life in the 21st century rests on a questionable assumption: namely, that social media simply amplifies academic work.
But I can't help wondering whether your research - at least as it is presented here - risks resting on a questionable assumption of its own? That core academic values and forms of communication should not themselves be subject to critical examination (at least not to the same extent as social media); that they can instead remain unmarked, masked, blacked-boxed, almost as an 'unquestioned good' against which social media can be measured and found wanting?
To build on your argument, should we not also find ways of using books, journals, conferences and talks more critically - that is, those conventional (non-social media) forms of communication that academics find essential and rely on to disseminate their work, build networks, increase visibility? How have these media (and the underlying logics through which they operate, embedded as they are within a capitalist economy and a system of liberal humanism) functioned, not merely as neutral vehicles for amplifying research and scholarship, but also as forces that shape how academic work is produced, experienced and evaluated? Indeed, how have these media served to transform academics themselves?
You show - extremely persuasively and incisively - how social media 'actively reorganizes academic life through three dynamics: spectacularisation, ephemerality, and academic narcissism.' What, then, would you say are the equivalent core values, concepts and dynamics by which books, journals and related forms organize academic life?
Complexity, nuanced argument, intellectual exchange and engagement, substance, slow thinking, sustained attention, cumulative dialogue, contributions to collective knowledge?
Or should we adopt a more critical stance here as well? If so, might we identify other organising assumptions and values: copyright and IP, the proprietorial human subject, the rational liberal individual as ultimate source of knowledge and authority, the unified, fixed, autograph text, fixed expression, linear sequential argument, for-profit publishing.
In that sense, the challenge may not simply be to resist the dynamics of social media, but also to 'do differently' with respect to these inherited forms of academic communication.
Which - to build on your argument one last time - perhaps raises another difficult but necessary question: why have we accepted, and why do we continue to accept, this model so readily, too?