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  • Socialized Scholarship: It Starts with Us
  • Susan Brown (bio)

Of social scholarshipadmittedly a more specific concept than that of social networking—I would like to say what Mahatma Gandhi allegedly replied when asked what he thought about Western civilization: I think it would be a good idea. Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter facilitate modes of digital sociality that, for all the press they are generating, don’t really represent a major shift in the way we do scholarship per se.

In the interests of full disclosure, I must admit that my sense that current social networking platforms haven’t substantially impacted on modes of scholarship may be because I just don’t get them. I’m a lousy Facebooker, though I recognize that it works for hordes of folks. Likewise with Twitter I am sporadic, though I find it an effective mode both of circulating scholarly news and of creating a distributed virtual conference in dialogue with the conventional one it annotates. Nevertheless, I think I have some insights to offer into where social scholarship might take us, given that for the last two decades I’ve been spending most of my time as a scholar working digitally and collaboratively. And collaboration is ineluctably, for better or for worse, social. [End Page 10]

Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and other social networking platforms clearly do a lot for academics, not to mention for millions of other people on the planet. They connect people, allow them to exchange information, broadcast news, and keep up to date. They collapse the globe, countering to some extent the differences between those in more connected academic locations, institutionally and geographically, and those who are more marginal. They are a new medium for a crucial aspect of scholarly life, and, in the words of the organizers’ provocation for this exchange on social networking, they offer “an important counterpoint to the often solitary life of scholarly endeavour.”

And yet in relationship to scholarship per se, these are first-generation digital activities. Just like the word processor didn’t really transform what the typewriter did, but allowed us to do it with less whiteout and more paper consumption, and the Online Public Access Catalogue opened up access to library collections without really troubling ideas of the record, the collection, or the index, these activities are better, stronger, faster versions of their analog precursors. They flow pretty directly from social interactions that we once had through letters, phone calls, newsletters, association journals, conferences, coffee breaks, lunch breaks, drinks at the faculty club or in the beer tent at Congress, and face-to-face encounters in libraries and archives. In many ways, in fact, digital networking compensates for the emptying of our hallways that digital tools have themselves produced by allowing us to do much of what we do from home offices.

My point is not to disparage social networking, some aspects of which have real potential. One is the public-facing nature of some of these new mediums of sociality. The “broadcast yourself” element of one-to-many or many-to-many communication offers the possibility of dissemination and exchange beyond the academy, although we are by and large still talking to ourselves. But I’d still contend that what is involved is more of a scaling up and enhancement than a fundamental change. Scholarship has always already been fundamentally social, and not just in terms of the social networks that have surrounded, aided, and abetted it. Scholarship simply is socially embedded. It has always reflected social currents, concerns, and values. And it has always been a conversation, continuing down through history, and often engaged heatedly with our contemporaries.

I’d like us to imagine what might be involved in a truly social or perhaps “socialized” scholarship that takes on board the radical potential of digital tools. In so doing, we need to avoid technological determinism: we’re not waiting for the right tools to come along. Wikipedia effected revolution in the way that knowledge was generated and circulated via the Web not [End Page 11] because the software was innovative. The software was mundane, in many respects archaic, but how it was mobilized by a community...

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