In my previous blog post I looked at two examples of interesting, localised uses of social media in academia. Now it is time to widen the focus and question whether or not social media successes within the academic sphere are achievable on a global scale. I’m going to look at the troubling case of the social networking platform Academia.edu and analyse where it went wrong by looking at the smaller success story of the Academic Jobs Wiki.
Academia.edu: a missed opportunity or doomed from the start?
Academia.edu was a social networking site tailored specifically for academics (i.e. post graduate students, researchers and lecturers) which took its inspiration from the Linkedin/Facebook formats with added abilities such as a facility to upload academic papers to be instantly accessed the world over. Despite early optimism in the blogosphere, the site’s remarkable potential remained unfulfilled. Indeed, as RMM’s resident academic and crystal ball gazer Dr Dan O’Connor predicted in his own first status post on Academia.edu a year ago: “This [site] will either end peer review or be dead in a month”. It has been his only post to date, and whilst the site hasn’t yet shuffled off the mortal coil it has certainly failed to blossom into a vital resource for academia in the same way that LinkedIn has in the world of business.
Here’s a brief table containing a few examples of Academia.edu usage by a selection of academic departments:(Numbers in brackets indicate the number of profiles which are ‘active’ I.E. where the profile has been visibly used in the last three months)
These numbers tell a story I found again and again across the site: a small proportion of lecturers sign up, followed by a handful of post grad students with the majority of profiles used rarely if at all. Ultimately, Academia.edu suffers from the same problem which has restricted even the more technically adroit academics from entering the blogosphere; namely the question ‘What’s in it for me?’ If leading academics in your field (the ‘influencers’ in social media-speak) aren’t engaging then the site quite rapidly becomes redundant as a serious academic resource.
The Academic Jobs Wiki and where Academia.edu went wrong
A striking contrast to the vast but sparsely populated landscape of Academia.edu is the Academic Jobs wiki. This is a smaller, but more focused, site which over the past few years has built a strong and thriving community sharing information and experiences pertaining to the rather opaque world of actually getting a job in academia. The Wiki’s success lies partially in an ability to provide a resource for information which is utterly unavailable elsewhere. By contrast, Academia.edu largely aggregates information, albeit very prettily, which is already available through online journals, academic mailing lists and databases such as Literature Online. Also interesting is the fact that unlike academia.edu the Jobs Wiki doesn’t have as much of a reliance on certain individuals to maintain its value to other academics. Here, anyone with experience of applying for academic jobs is valuable here and as such there is little risk of the site’s credibility being undermined by a lack of key influencers.
Ultimately Academia needed two things to succeed namely to provide content and functionality which was unsatisfactory or unavailable elsewhere and the widespread adoption across academia. I personally believe that by achieving the former Academia.edu would have had a great shot at nailing the latter but instead choose to offer a service that, whilst polished and ambitious in its scope, failed to offer academics something new and essential.
So what would social media need to do to cement itself in Academia? What are the currently neglected needs of Academia and could a single international social media platform ever succeed in meeting them? Will I finally write a post that comes in under Matt and Shona’s suggested 500 word limit? I’ll get back to you on these questions soon…
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