After reading both articles by the anonymous writer and by Kevin Gannon, I feel it’s really difficult to take a side or to disagree with both opinions because I think both authors have a point here. The digital world was invented for us (humans) to use it and to benefit from it, and I don’t think that the engineers who invented it made it exclusively available\u00a0for those involved with engineering. Speaking specifically about social media, I think anyone involved in any\u00a0academic field needs to use social media, just because it’s something immersed in our every day life, and it’s almost used everywhere around us, so it’s really hard to avoid it and push ourselves away from it. However, at the same time, I don’t believe that we\u00a0should\u00a0let it take over the traditional activities that we are accustomed to doing since we became involved in academia. Activities like, conducting research in a particular subject, responding to a presentation given by a speaker at a conference, getting a paper reviewed by\u00a0accredited reviewers, etc. Therefore,\u00a0the wy to go is to ballance between the two\u00a0sides of the spectrum.<\/p>\n
One of the points that Gannon mentions in his essay is that “social media has created opportunities for public engagement by scholars who don\u2019t fit the stereotype our Guardian <\/em>essayist\u00a0privileges …\u00a0me and others like me have found social media to be a democratizing and invigorating scholarly space.”\u00a0<\/span>(5). Now this point, is unfortunately a fact, and we can see that almost everyday online; however, I think that even if the opportunity is given to these scholars, it\u00a0doesn’t mean that what they’re saying online is always worthy of attention and consideration, it could be just nonsense. And from what Gannon is writing here, I get the sense that\u00a0because the “opportunities” are offered online (in the virtual world) for these\u00a0unconventional scholars, they stopped\u00a0looking for them\u00a0in the real world. So they settled for the online democratic “scholarly space” in exchange of fighting for places in the less democratic “scholarly space” in the real world. Although Gannon has readers reading his\u00a0published\u00a0articles in academic journals, he\u00a0seems\u00a0to be very proud of the number of readers for his\u00a0blog posts. Which could be a bit unfair comparison since there\u00a0is\u00a0a specific\u00a0audience reading the academic journal, which typically are scholars interested in the field of the journal,\u00a0versus an unspecified audience for the blog posts. Overall, I guess if Gannon had a solid proof to support his argument, like a survey or research findings, instead of expressing opinions and explaining personal experiences, his essay would have received more supportive comments from scholars who read it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After reading both articles by the anonymous writer and by Kevin Gannon, I feel it’s really difficult to take a side or to disagree with both opinions because I think both authors have a point here. The digital world was invented for us (humans) to use it and to benefit from it, and I don’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=792"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":826,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792\/revisions\/826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}