At the end of April, my Texas A&M colleague Kim Yi Dionne had a very nice post titled “why i blog/tweet,” in which she answered her own question:
“I’ve met three great colleagues via Twitter — meaning, I don’t know that I would have met them otherwise. Or, if I waited for some other facilitation of our meeting, it might have taken years (…).
There was a recent post in the New York Times about the ‘academic blogger.’ Precisely because I wouldn’t put haba na haba [Note: Kim’s blog] anywhere in the same universe as the Volokh Conspiracy in terms of its productivity/reach/following, I think the NYT post missed an opportunity to talk about the academic blogger upstarts. There are many of us assistant professors out there who are blogging about our work (and sometimes our lives) to get a greater reach than the other academics that read the papers we have written for peer-reviewed journals.”
Indeed there are. Generally speaking, I completely agree with Kim, and doubly so since I am one of the three colleagues Kim is referring to.
Kim and I met as a result of her inviting me to join the Midwest Group on African Political Economy, which held its inaugural meeting a few months ago and where I got to interact with a group of political scientists and economists working on research topics closely related to my own.
I doubt that would have happened if it had not been for our respective blogging and tweeting activities. After all, Kim is a political scientist. I am an economist. And for all the lip service paid to interdisciplinary work, there is little overlap between the two disciplines, although I believe that is changing.
Likewise, if it were not for my blogging and tweeting, I would not have met Ed Carr, Owen Barder, and a number of others whom I meet at a meetup in Washington, DC last January when I was there for the Africa Growth Forum.
Social Media: Good for Academics
Besides the obvious, I use social media to keep informed in two ways. First and foremost, it keeps me informed about what other scholars, policy makers, and the media are saying about the issues I am currently doing research on. In the five months or so I have been blogging and tweeting, I have derived at least three ideas for research papers from social media. Consequently, social media makes me a better researcher.
Second, it keeps me informed about what is not necessarily germane to my research yet still relevant to development policy. For example, I would never have heard about the seeming new trend toward admitting failure among development NGOs started by Engineers Without Borders. This is not directly relevant to my research, but it makes for a great example of signaling. Consequently, social media makes me a better teacher.
If you combine both these benefits with the fact that blogging makes me a better writer, the time I spend on writing blog posts — about an hour a day — is well worth it.
Generally speaking, I also think that social media is a helpful self-promotion tool for academics who want their research to be read outside of academia. This is especially relevant to someone whose primary appointment is in a policy school.
Lastly, using social media seems to be increasingly perceived in some quarters as a fourth responsibility besides research, teaching, and departmental or professional service. My University of Illinois colleague Barrett Kirwan, who blogs about agricultural policy, had a post this week titled “Blogging: A Researcher’s Social Responsibility” that quoted from a recent editorial in Nature:
“Through responsible use of blogs and social media, researchers have the power to chip away at misperceptions. This isn’t about flame wars or trolling comment boards — a lifetime could be spent telling people on the Internet that they’re wrong — but rather involves getting the right facts out there, and citing and linking to the best, most trustworthy sources of information.
Such diligence can also benefit scientists as members of a professional community. Researchers who make sure that personal and institutional websites, blogs and social-media pages are accurate and honest will enhance the usefulness of web searches by pushing the most relevant and trusted information to the top. This can make it easier for scientists to find one another for collaboration and reviewing papers, and to locate and fill jobs.
Enhancing visibility and promoting a digital image may strike some as unsavoury, but it is not. Researchers are right to promote themselves and their work in a reasonable capacity. The Internet has provided a tremendous tool to do this effectively. And a little more besides.”