‘Sharing’, Selfhood, and Community in an Age of Academic Twitter

Abstract

We explore in this paper the impulse to share our academic work via social media as well as the impact this sharing has on our senses of self as scholars and persons. We argue that this sharing raises a number of important philosophical questions: In what way does the branding or profiling encouraged by X/Twitter impact on our personal identity? How does the publicness of this particular platform disrupt the intimacy that lies at the heart of all edifying human relationship? And to invoke the terms of critical theorist, Axel Honneth, can we as teachers and researchers recognize ourselves in the social media sphere? Writing from the perspective of philosophy of education, Conroy and Smith (2017: 706) have argued that the contemporary university has been taken over by ‘Professor Lookatme’ and ‘Dr Loudmouth’ – but we are interested in the extent to which these caricatured figures are necessarily representative of today’s academy. While our paper draws attention to the dark side of social media, then, it still explores the possibilities for authentic selfhood as well as meaningful community in our increasingly digitized academic worlds.

Keywords

• higher education
• philosophy of education
• social media
• academic twitter