As all my friends have noticed, I’ve never spent a lot of time on social media. Indeed, I never quite figured out why I or anyone else should use it. What does, say, Facebook ultimately do for me? Facebook doesn’t get me friendship, intimacy, money, sex, professional publications, poppy seed cake, or any of the other things I value, so why bother?
Similarly, I’ve long been deeply cynical about social media for academics. If the net result of tweeting or posting is simply a bunch of people tweeting or posting back, what have we accomplished? Moreover, I liked to believe in an intellectual meritocracy based solely on scholarly research: quality work would stand on its own merits, just like in the ostensible good old days. But I’ve finally had to face the fact that my idealistic resistance to social media was counterproductive.
And with this lament out of the way, please join me in inaugurating my debut as a Public Intellectual. My Promethean 140 character proclamations can now be found at @NickWolfinger on Twitter.
Thanks for reading.
