To get directly to the point, I have to say that neither article has me completely convinced, and I think part of this is due to what is overlooked or hardly addressed in the cases for each “side”. Additionally, I wanted to be better convinced by Gannon’s argument.<\/p>\n
I agree in the sense that social media has a lot of opportunities for various types of people, academics included. I agree in that social media can be, as Gannon says, a “democratizing and invigorating scholarly space”. Social media can easily expand the available audience for a particular topic, set of ideas, etc., and potentially garner more interest than a scholarly article might be able to. Unfortunately, some of these benefits are lost in translation as I saw how quickly Gannon’s demeanor devolves from a “half-professor, half-faculty developer” weighty expertise to that of a common cyberbully, drawing attention to problems of the manifestation of the immediacy of thought (and consequently lashing out against dissenting opinions). When ‘another anonymous’ shares their opinion (in a manner where Gannon was just expressing the glory of democratization and a plethora of ideas), the article author dismissed the opinion as “paranoid”, “delusional”, and “flat-out wrong”, highlighting the toxicity that I feel is much more of a problem in the realms of social media than Gannon would like to admit. Social media has created a vast amount of opportunity in terms of networking, information sharing, and more, and yet I felt as though Gannon was purporting the idea that academia should be absorbed by the writing styles of these sites and apps.<\/p>\n
Because of the toxicity caused by the ease of hiding behind a screen and keyboard, in addition, to agreeing in some extent to Anonymous’s statements about people being “too busy checking their phones to look up and appreciate their surroundings”, I’m not entirely convinced by Gannon. As I said before, social media has a variety of positive traits. I empathize with Anonymous in regard to noticing people engrossed in social media as well; and I also notice it sometimes because of how much I myself am doing it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been trying to spend quality time with people (fellow academia students\/friends, family, etc.) and they’ve looked up after I was finished saying my conversational piece only to respond with “What? Sorry, I was checking my [insert social media app here]”. I entirely understand Anonymous’s frustration. However, I did notice that Anonymous was somewhat dismissive in the positive aspects about the outreach of social media and its potential, in a similar way in which Gannon underplayed the negative aspects (and then subsequently portrayed one of them). As Anonymous mentions “potential employers could be Googling your name, keeping an eye on your social media timelines”. Again, this goes both ways. Surely a poorly presented account would affect your job performance, but so could lack of involvement in your field. It’s one thing to be overly involved or appear to be trying too hard or touting controversial views all over, but being devoid of engagement entirely could sing an equally damaging note to the ears of employers.<\/p>\n
I understand the frustrations of the different sides of the spectrum so to speak, and one of the overarching thoughts I had upon finishing these articles is that they could learn a lot from each other’s views; Anonymous could be more open to engaging digitally and Gannon could be more cautious…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
To get directly to the point, I have to say that neither article has me completely convinced, and I think part of this is due to what is overlooked or hardly addressed in the cases for each “side”. Additionally, I wanted to be better convinced by Gannon’s argument. I agree in the sense that social […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813","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\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=813"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":818,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813\/revisions\/818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sheilaliming.com\/428DH\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}