Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ ‘Sharing’, Selfhood, and Community in an Age of Academic Twitter

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

This article "follows Gert Biesta's recent call to query the 'common sense' understanding of educational research" as it relates to social media, reflecting on the "subtle demand that the contemporary academic present to the world as a coherent, consistent, and orderly self." Twitter, we are told, "discourages a fluid and complex self. It prioritizes stability over self-creation." But as Richard Rorty would say, we need people to see us as complex and sometimes changing individuals. From here the article diverges a bit, on the one hand considering the new toxic Twitter (you can leave only iof you have a well-established identity) and on the other considering what's lost by staying on Twitter (intimacy, vulnerability and acknowledgement). Either way, networking on social media involves presenting oneself as an abstraction lacking the nuance found in a physical space "which draws people together, which fosters dwelling, and which invites care and connectedness." Image: LSE Blog, Time to Rethink Academic Twitter.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
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Last Updated: Dec 22, 2024 09:55 a.m.

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