Lines of Flight: The Digital Fragmenting of Educational Networks

Abstract

With the precipitous changes of the platform formerly known as Twitter, brought on by the change of ownership in late 2022, many networked educators sought, and continue to seek, new digital spaces to continue fostering and developing their digital practice. The authors of this article had all been actively networked on Twitter, and wanted to explore these changes in their professional worlds. As we sought out these spaces we critically began to interrogate our own practices on this platform to gain a deeper understanding of our practice going forward. We’ve approached this exploration through three vectors: an examination of the terms we use to describe movement from platform to platform, digital identity formation and disruption, and building human connection in digital spaces. The findings from our exploration yielded the following conclusions: (1) With regard to metaphors of movement (i.e., “migration”) we leave space open as to which metaphor to use as no metaphor is a perfect fit to explain the complexity of this phenomenon. (2) Digital identity/ies are multifaceted and sometimes place-specific, but some networked affordances seemed to encourage an ever-evolving digital identity more than other spaces. (3) Finally, digital spaces afford us the ability to carve out our own communities from the wider academic community, in the process developing a more owned and voiced identity. However as social media platforms are fleeting, those connections – and identities – are in danger of getting co-opted or deleted as platforms rise and fall.

Keywords

• social media
• twitter
• digital identity
• digital migration
• digital nostos
• digital communities
• digital fragmentation
• collaborative autoethnography