IDK if this is gonna resonate with anyone on this site but I have thoughts about the ways Academics go about doing public work, especially through social media (twitter, primarily). This isn't a deeply researched post or anything, just kinda thinking. Well, ranting really
So, I feel pretty at home with the internet, online jokes, youtube, tumblr, twitter, etc. I am also entering the final year of my PhD and am thinking about what I want to do once I graduate. I love public-facing work, and love the idea of doing long-form video essays, so I pay attention to how academics conduct themselves in online spaces.
Academics (before the Musk thing happened, and even now after) primarily use twitter to advertise themselves and their work, to celebrate their accomplishments, and to network. In some ways, that's very effective. Networking is deeply important for job hunting, and twitter allows people to become aware of one another and build connections.
HOWEVER, some academics also used twitter as a public education platform, and I think it's not as effective as many academics make it out to be (The exception is Dr. Raven Baxter, a molecular biologist who has done an excellent job in online spaces imo).
Maybe this is specific to fellow archaeologists, but I find that people in my field use twitter threads or quote-tweets to correct the rampant misinformation about my field. And I don't know how effective that really is? I personally don't enjoy reading twitter threads - maybe others do, but they don't hold my attention, and often the information you can provide is somewhat limited. I also don't like that you have to take an academic at their word, with a limited ability to see what their sources are and check them for yourself. But, this seems to be the golden standard for online public content in archaeology. It's what the academics do!
There are two further disconnects with online archaeologists and academics broadly: One, oftentimes there's a "callout" aspect to the quote-tweets. This type of post is geared towards a specific audience, and the callout content doesn't ACTUALLY change anybody's mind. It instead serves as a joke for the in-group who already know the misinformation is incorrect, and serves as entertainment (NOTE: I'm thinking specifically about the tweets I've seen calling out Ancient Aliens stuff. I know people who correct misinformation in a very measured and strategic way, and that is much more effective. But unfortunately, Ancient Aliens IS a TV show with an audience who isn't going to change their mind if you make fun of them.) Two (and this is actually my biggest gripe), there now exists a pressure to extend one's professional life into the personal life via social media.
This extension then makes your job a central part of your private identity. And as a result, I experience pressure to maintain a mostly-professional identity even in my private online spaces. (I could make a second, private anonymous twitter account. But my friends follow me on my twitter and I don't wanna.) I want to be able to make stupid little jokes, but they're always tempered by the fact that twitter has become a pseudo-workplace for academia. I can be silly, but not as silly as I really want to be because my advisor will see it.
I'm a whole person - I study the things I do because I think they're interesting. If I talk about them on twitter, then that's my professional twitter. If I make stupid jokes, then it's my private twitter. So I end up walking the line by basically never posing on twitter, while allowing myself to make silly jokes as a treat with the occasional milestone update.
But you know why this disconnect especially bothers me? I think that public work is so much more effective when it doesn't have a veneer of professionalism. I truly think the long-form video format of Hbomberguy, Jenny Nicholson, Shanspeare, Munecat, etc could be an excellent frontier for public education. And that includes the silly jokes and references. So when I complain about the idea that I need to have a professional public twitter, it's not the public aspect of my work that bothers me. It's that I feel my personality has to be tempered in order to please other academics, when really I want to make tweets for my friends and people who aren't archaeologists.
There's also a whole other rant I have about how academics misjudge how to communicate their work, and the fact that our work is NOT inherently interesting and you DO have to work to capture and audience, but that's a whole other bucket of fish.