A recent post on the Guardian, titled, “I’m A Serious Academic, Not A Professional Instagrammer,” argues against propelling oneself to stardom on social media. Professing to be a young Ph.D. student, the author suggests: “[S]urely the dedication I show in the lab, and the subsequent data I collect, should speak for itself.”
This created a bit of debate, ironically, enough, on Twitter, with the #seriousacademic hashtag. Today’s column is a letter to the writer of that Guardian piece.
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Dear Serious,
I read your Guardian column with interest. Like you, I am a serious academic. We are likely in different realms of scholarship and in different disciplines. Also, I use social media far more than you would like. However, we at least share the notion that we believe ourselves to be serious academics.
Academia is broad and diverse. It may be the case that you have great academic success without engaging in social media. I hope that happens for you. Your research may be well regarded and well known without social media. You may make a positive contribution to society just by the weight of your findings.
My first point to you is this: I do not live in that world. I live in the world of the legal scholar.
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The world of legal scholarship isn’t what it used to be. It is a world of ever-increasing volumes of law review publications, with more law professors publishing more articles in more journals. Some of it is very good. But most of it (good or bad) very few will ever read. It’s really hard to get noticed, unless you write in a broad topic. Most of us are pretty well known in a small topic. Even so, it gets kind of boring to write and have only your friends read it. Also, it’s upsetting when those contracts folks have more friends than us obscure law folks.
Moreover, it’s very difficult to get someone outside of academia to read those articles. Some of us have been fortunate and have been cited by courts, administrative agencies, and legislatures. But that may not get noticed at all outside our small realm.
We also have a terrible system of reward: If you manage to interest law review students in your article, you get a higher placement in a journal. Thus, law scholars have completely abdicated on the question of quality, leaving it in the hands of the untrained. I don’t live in peer-review land, although I do try to visit there frequently because the view is better there.
As we search for meaning, many use social media to interact and to get ourselves known. Others use it for knowledge, networking, or a myriad of other legitimate reasons. If you don’t want to, that’s fine. No one is forcing you to do so. Some of us find value in it. That doesn’t mean that we have to be homogenous.
My second point to you: There is a difference between engaging in social media for the purposes of some personality defect and engaging in social media for a legitimate purpose. I’ve mentioned before that there are a lot of narcissists out there in academia. But that doesn’t mean a professor taking a selfie is a narcissist.
A narcissist already believes himself to be awesome, often without any empirical data to support it.
Nor does it necessarily mean that the person has low self-esteem, although that is rampant in academia as well. If a professor uses social media to tear down others and SOLELY for their own self-promotion, that could suggest this problem. That would translate into their own “real time” lives, too. If one looks, one can find lack of humility on Twitter. It isn’t difficult.
I suppose the upshot of my two points is this: The serious academic is one who researches well, teaches students, cares about improving society, and is humble about their contribution. The goal is making the world a better place, and sometimes marketing helps that happen.
The serious academic wants to talk about ideas, to learn about things, and is never so presumptuous as to think that his or her colleagues have nothing to offer in terms of learning. Thus, the serious academic is open-minded about the world around, and not dismissive of others. The serious academic takes criticism of ideas to heart and addresses it.
In other words, there are many ways to improve society. The serious academic attempts to do so. Sometimes that may, for some, require social media. For others, it may not. Suggesting that you have the moral compass for all of academia, however, is a bit presumptuous.
But I do agree with you on Instagram. I don’t get that.
LawProfBlawg is an anonymous professor at a top 100 law school. You can see more of his musings here and on Twitter. Email him at [email protected].