📱🚫 On withdrawal from social media

In less than twenty four hours my book Platform and Agency: Becoming Who We Are will be released. In an important sense I worked on this book for fifteen years, beginning with my part-time PhD in 2008 and ending with the initial phase of my LLM research in 2023. I feel ambivalent about it in a number of ways. I somehow conspired to rush it despite the fact I worked on it for well over a decade. I let an utterly avoidable crisis of intellectual confidence derail it in the later years of the 2010s. I didn’t get the chance to ask Maggie Archer to write a forward to it. I somehow dropped the ball and agreed to a £35 eBook and £116 hardback which means I wouldn’t buy it myself. Rather than enter a third year of negotiation with the publisher I pushed it over the finish line when it still wasn’t quite in the shape I wanted to get it into. Frankly I needed to move on with my life and completing Platform and Agency enabled me to do it in a whole range of ways.

It still feels like a significant occasion though. It’s my fourth monograph, fifth if you count the second edition of Social Media for Academics which was basically a rewrite from scratch. It’s the tenth book I’ve published overall. This makes it feel less significant in the sense that I’ve released five books in the last five years and the novelty is wearing off. What makes it feel special is that this book, for all its flaws, has a radical originality which other things I’ve written or edited lack. It captures a specific way of making sense of the role of technology in the social world, which I’ve been monomaniacally pursuing ever since I realised how significant bulletin boards were to my teenage years. It offers a genuinely original way of making sense of how platforms influence how we became who we are, including what this process of becoming entails in psychosocial terms. I’ll leave it to readers to decide if it’s useful or interesting. But it’s certainly intellectually unique. It captures what I think is a coherent social ontology underpinning the bizarre range of topics I’ve worked on over the course of my career.

Hence the vague desire to shout about it. Look look I did a book! I did a big theory book! Even if it’s much smaller big book than planned because pragmatism, a concern for my own well-being and the publisher’s reticence meant I dropped a couple of chapters from the plan. I would sincerely like anyone who’s interested to know this book exists so they are more likely to read it. I would like anyone who has expressed curiosity about my research agenda to at least skim the book because it’s the most foundational answer to the question “what do you research?” I’m ever likely to produce. But I realised this evening as I was psyching myself up for a joyless engagement with social media that I don’t want these things enough to reenter the Twittering Machine.

I can see the costs involved in not shouting about this book (or the three papers I’ve had published recently) but I just don’t care enough to want to reactive my Bluesky account or log into Linkedin for the first time in months. I last posted on Linkedin almost six months ago and I’m suddenly wondering if I’ll ever post on it again. Or any other social media for the matter. I just feel such a vivid aversion when I contemplate logging into these platforms again that I’m wondering what, if anything, would prompt me to do it. I feel a precarious sense of clarity about my life (and my work) which the rhythms of social media now appear profoundly threatening to. It feels like standing on the side of a choppy ocean and realising how stupid it would be to dive in even if I felt it might be a useful way to get some exercise. Clearly these are addiction metaphors and I don’t use them in a psychoanalytically naive way. I think my addiction to Twitter was worse than most people’s but social media is nonetheless suffused with addictive behaviour. From the vantage point of retreating from platforms for a couple of years and then entirely leaving them six months ago, they just look profoundly uninviting.

There’s a privilege in escaping the Twittering Machine. I have a fairly widely followed blog that’s been on the internet forever (which increasingly means it shows up in LLM responses amongst other advantages). I know how to write guest blogs for visible platforms even if I don’t do it as much as I should. I’ll be setting up a project blog and podcast imminently which I’m fairly certain someone else will be able to handle the social media for. I get invited to give lots of talks and keynotes, albeit pretty exclusively on the applied side of my work rather than the theoretical stuff I do. I’m securely employed in a place I feel valued and where people listen to me about stuff that I’m interested in. In this sense I’m not suggesting that full withdrawal from social media is a generalisable solution or even the right one for most people. But I wanted to share how I increasingly experience it, in the interests of honesty as someone who spent a big chunk of the 2010s persuading academics to use social media.

I don’t think my argument that you can use social media reflectively was wrong, only that I was naive about how platform incentives made that extremely difficult in practice. Indeed the second edition of Social Media for Academics was an attempt to work this out in real term and steer the debate in a more productive direction. Likewise I now think that my advice in Generative AI for Academics had a similar weakness in that it didn’t consider how LLMs are going to be optimised for engagement over the coming years. I slightly underplayed how difficult higher education makes it to use LLMs reflectively (though the final chapter explores this at length) but much as with social media I think the problem will soon be designed into the platforms rather than something we can circumvent through reflective practice. There are structural reasons why it’s difficult to use platforms without getting sucked into a vortex which makes attention and commitment difficult to sustain. There are certainly gains which can come through their use but everyone still using social media needs to think carefully about whether these outweigh the costs.

There’s something which clarifies when you say ‘no’ to all this. A sense of sharper edges that come from choosing boundaries rather than just letting them emerge.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5CVsCnxyXg

#acceleratedAcademy #addiction #blog #books #life #PlatformAndAgency #platforms #promotion #selfPromotion #SocialMedia #socialMediaForAcademics #writing

Are you overworking as an academic?

I recently inventoried everything I was committed to doing and asked myself the following questions:

• Am I contractually obliged to do this?
• Has someone in a position of seniority directly asked me to do this?
• Do I care deeply about this? Does it excite me?
• Will I be letting a close colleague or friend down if I don’t do this?

It was surprising how many things I was doing for which the answer to this was ‘no’ 🤔

#academic #academicWork #acceleratedAcademy #careers

We urgently need to talk about the temptations of LLMs for academics

If we want to understand how academics use large language models (LLMs) we need to begin with the reality of the conditions most of us are working within.

This is a temptation I’ve experienced in my own work. I felt it strongly for the first time when struggling to complete a co-authored piece for an impending deadline. There was an element in the article I believe it was important to include but my co-author felt much less strongly about.

I wasn’t happy with the contents of the article, as it was missing discussion of a topic which I felt was hugely important, yet I was tired and distracted in exactly the way that makes writing difficult. I knew what I wanted to include but not how to include it. The words were not flowing, the deadline was approaching and I didn’t want to let my co-author down. I knew there was material on my blog which I couldn’t directly reproduce but which could easily provide inspiration for Claude to write passages which matched my writing style. It was the first time I had seriously contemplated relying on machine writing to complete a formal publication. I could not see a satisfactory way of resolving my dilemma: I didn’t want to exclude this topic from the article, I didn’t want to let my co-author down but I was also too sleep-deprived to write the required text that afternoon.

It strikes me in retrospect that I wouldn’t have contemplated including machine writing if I hadn’t been confident that Claude could match my style. In previous months I had experimented with giving it samples of my writing, asking it to characterise the style in bullet point lists, then using these descriptions in order to refine a prompt to match how I write. I wasn’t certain but it felt like Claude could match my writing in a way which others would likely find utterly plausible. This was initially an exploration of how subterranean machine writing could become but in that moment of temptation I saw the consequences of this capacity for the first time. I wasn’t comfortable including machine writing that was declared to the reader, either explicitly in the text or tacitly by simply including passages written in a jarringly different style. Even if the publisher had been ok with this, which I hadn’t gone as far as to investigate, it would have felt like an abdication of my authoriality. I’m sure it would have made my co-author deeply uncomfortable as well. But if the machine writing wouldn’t be identifiable to anyone other than me? That was a different prospect which offered a way out of my dilemma. I could fill in the text with a short section, satisfying my intellectual requirement to cover the topic while also meeting the deadline for the article.

What made it even more tempting was this machine writing would have been expressing my own ideas. There was no sense of asking Claude to provide the ideas. I simply had the ideas in one form (notes on my blog) which I needed to translate into another form (a section of an article) but which I was not in the moment capable of acting on. In the end I couldn’t do it. I have rarely had such a vivid sense of the devil and angel on respective shoulders in a professional setting. I could see a practical case for acceding to the temptation, in that it would produce a better piece under the circumstances which I found myself in. But if I did then I felt I would inevitably do it in similar situations in the future. Even with the best planning, a standard which none of us can consistently meet, there will always be circumstances where we have writing responsibilities which outstrip our present capacities. If we develop a comfort with leaning on machine writing in those situations, I suspect the category will expand and we will gradually find ourselves relying on it in situations which would once have felt simply challenging rather than impossible. It’s a retreat from the trouble of writing, one which is particularly tempting when that trouble feels insurmountable, but which has the capacity to subtly unpick the moral psychology through which writing comes to be meaningful and satisfying to us.

What’s at stake here isn’t just a question of research ethics or academic integrity in the formal sense. There’s something more fundamental about our relationship to the creative process itself. The constraints we face as writers (whether time, energy or our own cognitive limitations) create the conditions in which genuine intellectual work happens. Without that productive friction, something essential to scholarly identity may be lost.

The use of machine writing in knowledge production is still in its infancy and, even with detailed empirical investigation, there is a limit to how far we could answer these questions in relation to an issue which is developing so rapidly. In raising them I’m trying to highlight the questions, rather than take a stance as to the answers. The assumption that human authoriality underpins what we write in monographs, edited books and journals is so axiomatic that it is difficult at this stage to think through what knowledge production looks like when it can no longer be assumed. Explorations of the potential implications often oscillate between feeling mundane, preoccupied by minutiae around the edges of practice which will otherwise feel unchanged, and feeling grandiose, making sweeping generalisations which tend to overstate the issues involved.

This is exactly why empirical investigation will be so crucial to stabilising our understanding of how academics are using machine writing, as well as what this use means for knowledge production. But what I’m trying to do is, rather than even offer a comprehensive review of the fragmented and pre-print heavy literature in its current stage, open up the conceptual issues involved with a view to supporting academics in reflecting on their writing practice in relation to the rapidly developing possibilities which machine writing offers in their mundane working life.

My suggestion is that difficulty is at the heart of how academics will tend to relate to the possibilities of machine writing. Conversational agents provide us with new ways of negotiating difficulties in the writing process. They can offer new perspectives on what we have written, help us elaborate upon what we are trying to say and provide detailed feedback of a form which would have previously required a human editor. The attempt to eliminate difficulty from the writing process will have downstream consequences for our own writing practice, as well as the broader systems through which (we hope) our writing makes an intellectual contribution.

The reason I’m focusing on the experience of joy in academic writing is not simply that this makes it less likely we will hear the siren song of machine writing in the first place. I will argue that if we rely on machine writing when confronted with difficulties, those experiences of joy are likely to become more elusive and perhaps even disappear altogether from our writing lives. It is only through staying with these difficulties, even when it’s uncomfortable and dispiriting, that we can make it through to the other side.

This isn’t to suggest we must reject these tools entirely. Rather, we might consider approaching them with the same deliberate intentionality that characterizes thoughtful writing itself. Perhaps the question isn’t whether to use AI writing assistance, but when, how, and with what awareness of what we might be surrendering in the process. The most dangerous temptation may not be using these tools, but using them unconsciously, without reflecting on how they reshape not just what we produce, but who we become as scholars through the process of producing it.

My concern is that the critical discourse, while accurate in many respects, fails to create the space for these conversations about practical reasoning by academics.

#academicLabour #academicWork #acceleratedAcademy #claude #higherEducation #writing

The Joy of Academic Writing in the Age of AI

I once imagined an academic career involved a lofty devotion to knowledge at a distance from the world. This is what Bourdieu (2000: 1) described as “the free time, freedom from the urgencies of the world, that allows a free and liberated relation to those urgencies and to the world”. Or as the philosopher Richard Rorty once put it to a friend asking him about whether he was happy in this new role, “Universities permit one to read books and report what one thinks about them, and get paid for it” (Gross 2003).

Even if this was true of a tenured professor at an Ivy League university in 1980s America, it certainly isn’t true now for the vast majority of academics. It took me a while to come to terms with that fact, but what was constant in this process was the enjoyment of writing. It was precisely because of that enjoyment, the impulse ‘to read books and report what I thought about them’, that the reality of academic work felt so disappointing to me. It’s something I’ve long since made my peace with, but the fact it was a compromise I came to has left the enjoyment of writing at the heart of my professional self-conception: the space that can be found for it and the obstacles which stand in its way.

Unfortunately those obstacles are numerous. There are the new things which academics are expected to do, such as make research relevant to wider society and the mechanisms, such as social media, through which we are expected to do it. There is the growth in the work to be done as student numbers increase and our interactions with them increasingly take place through multiple channels. There are the spiralling expectations of what constitutes being productive, driven in part by a job market which is brutally competitive in some systems.

I take as background the widespread sense that there is a deep somatic crisis in higher education, which has structural roots (Burrows 2012). As Vostal (2016) demonstrates, it would be too simple to say the problem is one of speeding up, to which the solution would be to slow down. The evidence suggests that our relationship to speed is more ambivalent than this. I certainly recognize the enjoyment which can be realized through rushing under the right circumstances, such as the intense focus which can come with an imminent deadline or the intellectual sociability generated through an intensive workshop.

There is also a politics to speed too often overlooked by advocates of ideas like the ‘slow professor’ (Berg 2022). In my experience, the choice for a professor to slow down often relies on post docs who are willing to pick up the slack for them. But there is nonetheless a sense of rushing, of never having quite enough time for all the things we are expected to do, common within the contemporary academy (Carrigan 2016).

Obviously this is an experience which is far from confined to academics and the university, reflecting a broader sense of being harried in contemporary societies (Rosa 2014). It is easy for the time and space in which we might enjoy writing to find itself squeezed on all sides by the urgent items we are struggling to clear from our to-do list. It is easy to conclude from this experience that writing necessarily has to be a slow process, in which an excess of time and space provide the conditions in which creative writing is possible.

This is fundamentally mistaken, with the sense that writing requires an abundance of time actually being a potent obstacle to a regular and rewarding writing routine. But it is conversely difficult to immerse yourself in writing if you feel harried, assailed on all sides by unmet expectations and impending deadlines. There is a risk this leads to a sense of enjoying writing being a luxury, as opposed to a practical requirement of the job which must be dispensed with as quickly and efficiently as possible.

If you frame writing in these terms then the instrumental use of AI becomes an inevitability. Why wouldn’t you rely on these systems to do your writing for you if that writing is an unwelcome obligation which weighs heavily on your working life? This gets to the heart of my concern. There is a pessimistic and self-defeating mood which too often accompanies academic writing. This is a problem in its own terms because it makes what should be a source of joy for academics into a gruelling chore. But with the advent of a technology which can do this writing for us, this mood goes from being individually self-defeating to potentially catastrophic for the knowledge system.

As Sword (2023: loc 220) points out, “writing signals hard work and puritanical virtue, while pleasure drips with hedonistic vice”. The tendency for academics to relate to writing as a serious matter, serving a lofty purpose beyond the trivial matters of feeling, rather than something which pleasure can be taken in makes it difficult to have these conversations. I share Sword’s (2023: loc 226) project “to recuperate pleasure as a legitimate, indeed crucial, writing-related emotion”. Indeed, such a recuperation is imperative, individually and collectively, because of the impact which AI is already starting to exercise over why and how we write.

If you’re taking joy in an activity, why would you outsource it? I struggle to see a difference in this sense between relying on machine writing and seeking an assistant who can work on your behalf. There might be contingent challenges which mean you need support at a particular point in time, as well as a need to prioritize certain tasks over others. In this sense I wouldn’t suggest the impulse to outsource a task necessarily means you don’t take joy in it, but if you persistently seek external support for a type of task or a project composed of multiple tasks, this suggests the potential for exploring your motivation.

There are parts of my administrative work which I’ve found myself tempted to rely on machine writing for. I’ve come to realize this is a red flag which indicates there’s a part of my portfolio of work I’m struggling with in some way or coming to be alienated from. The impulse to outsource it to a machine, to just get it done immediately rather than expanding any more energy on it, will become a mainstream one within higher education over the coming years. The ubiquity of this software, particularly as it comes to be embedded in the existing collaboration platforms which universities provide for their staff, means it will be ‘in here’ rather than ‘out there’.

Meeting this temptation reflexively requires that we understand our work, the tasks that compose it, and how we tend to experience them. Do we persistently avoid or procrastinate from particular activities? What do we choose to do instead when we’re being avoidant? These questions help us identify which aspects of our academic writing might be at risk of being outsourced to AI, not because the technology offers genuine improvements, but because we’ve lost touch with the joy those activities might provide.

#academicWriting #acceleratedAcademy #acceleration #productivity #sociologyOfHigherEducation #time #universities

What's the point of academic writing?

Is it to get promoted, published, have impact, think through complexity, get "the right information in the right place so it can change lives?"

Do we need new criteria?

#AcWri #AI #AcceleratedAcademy #SlowAcademia
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2023/11/02/we-need-more-garbage-subtraction-because-of-ai/