What follows is more a philosophical meandering on our readings on Social Media this week. As such, the pieces we read are not cited specifically, but rather inspired this loose discourse:

As a *geriatric* millennial, I gleefully transitioned from chat rooms, to Geocities pages, to AOL/ICQ chat rooms, and inevitably to MySpace. MySpace was your personal space to share anything and everything you would like about yourself. And we tended to overshare. This was the age of posting random thoughts, pictures of every meal, but also a way to legitimately keep up with friends and family. 

In retrospect the rapid-fire transitions from social media platform to platform have been relatively seamless until one takes the time to put the brakes on and look back. Facebook was like a MySpace plus, but quickly deteriorated towards pushing promoted materials (and of course misinformation). Instagram and Twitter were platforms we hopped on next, striving to recapture that “authenticity” increasingly lost. Instagram brought us back to images of our friends and families, and Twitter allowed for an open and international forum to share thoughts. Until- again, an inevitable slouch towards promoted content and a propensity for circulating misinformation. 

This breakneck change in how we consume, and now create media content also passed us by. Where I was once enthusiastic to share my thoughts and pictures from the latest social gathering, I have largely stopped. Like so many of us, I have friends who have been, or currently are micro-influencers whose social media presence began to take on a language of branding, marketing, and eventually, a least a little advertising. Besides my personal disinterest in being a known entity, the strain of continuing to come up with content to support your profile, and boost interaction and reach- tires me out just thinking of it. Not to mention the fear of generating the unintended ire not only of the public at large, but possibly by current and future employers. 

And to the question, of who owns this content? While the creator does have the power to ultimately remove their content and/or profile from these platforms, posts may have been captured by other means. Do we know if the platforms that hosted them truly delete their information? And where one wants to aggregate data from posts whether for commercial or academic purposes- where is the line drawn on who owns what? When is consent for use called for? Is embedding an individual post enough credit? What of scraping large amounts of data? And the logistics of getting informed consent, especially when using massive troves of data? Of course, the platforms themselves hold the bulk of these keys. 

We’ve known this, and we’ve known that each new platform that has the potential to be the next place to find our collective authenticity will inevitably by spoiled for the purpose of increasing revenue- but yet, we often stay on the ride perhaps a little too long- until eventually the ride naturally comes to an end, or some sort of brakes are suddenly pressed, allowing us the moment to finally reflect on the racetrack we find ourselves on, and will likely stay on. 

This week’s readings were an excellent practical and philosophical introduction to new modes of scholarly communication. Overall, a theme I noticed is a call towards overturning traditional academic and publisher power dynamics. Fitzpatrick (2021) brings to the table a more public and open discourse with the “public” both inside and outside academia to reach greater audiences and have wider impact with one’s scholarship. I’ve often grappled with the notion of great ideas staying within ivory towers, that may have little impact outside academia’s walls. New forms of sharing and publishing ideas in a more open and democratic fashion can break down these walls, while also improving the internal academic discourse on subjects that more align with the wider public’s needs and interests. Fitzpatrick found that blogs vastly improved their reach with their ideas, much more than work done in silos for dissertations and scholarly publication. Further, inviting more members of the public into a modified peer-review process helped their own academic pursuits, while perhaps enhancing other’s forays into their own research, whether they were affiliated with an academic institution or not. 

Although blogs as we knew them seem to have had their hey-day in terms of reach, I do know that Substack (which is heavily blog-based, along with other modalities) has had a significant amount of pull with academic authors while also potentially providing subscription based revenue directly to the original content creator. With the increasing insignificance of the platform formerly known as Twitter, some of those that had cultivated a following for their ideas have moved onto different platforms such as Substack to continue the conversation. The challenge to keep up with changing platforms continues however. 

Speaking of compensation, Suber’s (2012) OA book introduction argues that because academics receive a salary from their academic institute, and they have traditionally not been compensated for their writing, that they are prime for the OA movement. This is true, but I feel this argument leaves out that those in academia are often under-compensated for their labor, particularly those lower in rank, who conversely, are the most in need of getting published. That is not to make an argument against OA, but to highlight that disparity and to provide an update touched on in Risam and Gil’s (2022) paper. Since OA has made a bit of splash, the traditional academic publishers have taken notice and have created their own OA models. Big names like ElSevier, Taylor & Francis, Wiley/Springer, Sage, etc. promote the “good” of OA, but not at the expense of their profit. Instead, many offer models to pay to play. In as such, the author, or the academic institution must pay a fee (usually quite substantial) in order for that article to be published in OA format. The draw being that since these are the traditional academic publishers, they typically host more “prestigious” journals, which academic institutions favor when considering a faculty members promotion or tenure. Then on top of that- the academic institutions’ Library is still paying exorbitant amounts in order to have access to the non-OA content from those publishers in a subscription based model whose prices increase each year. 

The implications of these increasingly complex models is beyond the scope of this blog post, but it does further illuminate the glowing potential of “green” OA in university commons and the Manifold publishing platform. Our very own professors and JoJo (2022) are putting up the good fight in not only creating polished and democratic forms of publishing, but are also adding interactive elements to enhance the “eBook” experience. From working in the K-12 sphere in the 2010s, and being exposed as a Librarian to academic textbooks, I have seen an increase in the big publishers including these interactive and multimedia elements to their official textbooks. However, these come at a huge expense that is often not sustainable for most K-12 schools or individual college students to support since they require each individual student to purchase an access code for these textbooks. Manifold can start to break down these barriers as we continue to push for the normalization of OER texts in Higher Ed, that will hopefully have a trickle down effect for K-12 and general publishing over time.