Publicity and self-branding can backfire against academic researchers who study media
For many academics, using social media has both drawbacks and advantages. Social media may allow connection with colleagues, scholarly promotion, and public engagement, and may also open researchers up to criticism and even possible harassment. This essay argues that we must think critically about logics of self-branding and attention-seeking given these two sides of the coin of social media publicity. First, publicity can easily be weaponized against scholars engaging in projects that may be socially or politically controversial by individuals or organizations who disagree with their premises. Universities are often unprepared to deal with this negative publicity and fail to protect researchers from the consequence. Second, self-branding may undermine one’s ability to be viewed as a serious scholar and requires rigorous self-censorship, particularly for those far from the white, male ideal of the professoriate. I conclude with some recommendations for academic social media use at different career stages.
Minding the gap between public opinion and social media data
For most of the twentieth century, public opinion was nearly analogous with polling. Enter social media, which has upended the social, technical, and communication contingencies upon which public opinion is constructed. This study documents how political professionals turn to social media to understand the public, charting important implications for the practice of campaigning as well as the study of public opinion itself. An analysis of in-depth interviews with 13 professionals from 2016 US presidential campaigns details how they use social media to understand and represent public opinion. I map these uses of social media onto a theoretical model, accounting for quantitative and qualitative measurement, for instrumental and symbolic purposes. Campaigns’ use of social media data to infer and symbolize public opinion is a new development in the relationship between campaigns and supporters. These new tools and symbols of public opinion are shaped by campaigns and drive press coverage, highlighting the hybrid logic of the political media system. The model presented in this paper brings much-needed attention to qualitative data, a novel aspect of social media in understanding public opinion. The use of social media data to understand the public, for all its problems of representativeness, may provide a retort to long-standing criticisms of surveys—specifically that surveys do not reveal hierarchical, social, or public aspects of opinion formation. This model highlights a need to explicate what can—and cannot—be understood about public opinion via social media.
How we define social media engagement shapes relationships between journalists and audiences
Scholarly and pragmatic definitions of the term “engagement” vary drastically. This article attempts to capture the nuances of the term by exploring journalists’ roles on social media where “engagement” is supposed to be particularly prevalent. Using in-depth interviews, we gauge the attitudes of traditional political journalists as well as those who think of themselves as “engagement specialists” about their responsibilities in interactive spaces. In addition, we analyze what kinds of engagement are happening in these spaces, and how citizens’ expectations are being articulated, in terms of journalist-audience relationship—an organic resultant of engagement. We found that journalists are taking on new kinds of roles in social spaces—often in the name of “engagement”—but that work is not always particularly interactive with citizens; rather, content is engaged with. In contrast, citizens look to journalists to play a number of roles that range from civic guide to therapist. Thus, relationship building happens sporadically. Furthermore, engagement level is dependent on the platform and its affordances. This research offers a continuum of social media engagement conceived as relationship building that can reconcile the disparities in how we define engagement, and suggests newsrooms appreciate the nuances via a series of recommendations.