It all depends on what you mean by social media

I have been moved to post in this rather desultory blog of mine by noticing that there is a furore going on over this article: We should not have to parade ourselves on social media to please our employers or be considered enthusiastic 

Well, I'm a bit dubious that employers should be demanding this of academics, unless it's considered part of their core job within working hours, but if they're doing on what might somewhat euphemistically considered their own time, it's up to them.

On another hand, speaking as someone whose day-job was being an archivist and who contrived what I think is a fairly satisfactory career as an independent scholar in my own time and with a few periods of research leave, the internet made a significant difference to me. I set up my own website in 1998, and I suspect that far more people have accessed my Victorian Sex Factoids page than have read my books, articles and chapters. I also set up the precursors of H-Histsex, on free sites offering listserv hosting in perpetuity (they lied). Later on I set up this blog for academic/archivist purposes, although I had already been blogging elsewhere in a more informal and social way.

'Social media' is not all one thing. As can be seen from the foregoing I came of internet-age when listservs were the happening thing for geographically-scattered academics to communicate with one another - and they still serve this purpose, somewhat below present-day radar. Problems arise when people think that 'everybody' is using one particular medium.

This blog post bears witness to the fact that I often see something in a tweet and think I should respond but 140 characters is just not the medium for what I want to say.

And on further twitter-problems: what does one do when somebody links a blog-post in a tweet, and one sees that although one is in general concurrence, they have made a blooper within one's own area of expertise - not something that could be clarified in 140 characters. Also on closer inspection the post was written several years ago. Couldn't find an email for the writer.

Social media, old and new

I have recently been given to think about certain things which Twitter is not very useful for, one of which is asking research questions to which a simple answer cannot be given. Sometimes it's just not possible to give a snap 140 character response, or refer to an online resource or even a published work. There are questions which, however straightforward they may look, need unpacking in order to tease out the problems, and the suggestion of an array of possibilities for finding out the required information.

This sort of thing was much better served by the email-based listserv, but I'm not sure that younger scholars, used to Web 2.0 social media, engage with listservs any more? I was certainly quite surprised to come across a blog post by a younger scholar talking about the benefits of forms of social media I associate with the 2010s for engaging with the wider field of the discipline, making contacts, getting one's work known about; because I found that listservs also did this, back in the Upper Palaeolithic (in internet terms) of the 1990s.

They even had archives that were searchable: though the constant recurrence of certain questions which had already been addressed on-list led me to produce the first version of the Victorian Sex Factoids Page and to compile a bibliography of recent work on Victorian Psychiatry beyond the one work published nearly 30 years that everybody still keeps citing so that I could just link to these rather than reiterating the same message.

New technology and new media do not necessarily drive out the old, which may still have their uses. The major nexus for humanities listservs, H-Net is currently undergoing a massive upgrade to bring it more into line with modern web-use practices, but there remains a value in having the potential to respond to research queries in a more discursive and nuanced fashion than 140 characters permits.

Things of interest

Recently received in email from diverse sources:

Gender Bodies & Technology listserv: Please visit our website which includes an archive of the 2010 conference [which looks as though it must have been extremely interesting]:
<http://www.cpe.vt.edu/gbt/> http://www.cpe.vt.edu/gbt/


We invite you to join the listserv which serves as a place to share about
new works, publications and art exhibitions, as well as circulate relevant
calls for papers and job postings. The list is also an opportunity to
network with other scholars in this area of research and to build a sense of
community among those of us that otherwise might not cross paths due to our
own disciplinary locations. We are also in the process of drafting a call
for papers for a 2012 conference, details of which will be forthcoming.

Also, please feel free to forward this invitation and subscription
instructions to folks (or other relevant listservs) that you know who might
be interested in joining the list:

To subscribe to the list:

1.    Access your e-mail.
2.    Address a new message to  <mailto:listserv@listserv.vt.edu>
listserv@listserv.vt.edu.
3.    In the body of the message, type: subscribe
[Gender_Bodies_and_Technology] [First Name] [Last Name]

Feel free to contact me with an y questions or if you have trouble
subscribing to the list. My email:  <mailto:selber@vt.edu> selber@vt.edu

----

Call for Papers History of Psychology and Psychiatry Postgraduate Conference, 19th March 2011.
The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL will host a one day conference for postgraduate students working on the history of psychology and psychiatry. The conference is intended to develop a network of postgraduates across different universities, and to provide a forum for current research in the field. The conference is open to students from both the UK and abroad. There will be funding available to cover travel costs and refreshments will be provided. We welcome papers on any historical period, and on any geographical region. To see what some of our students are working on, please follow this link: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/histmed/people/research_students A title and a brief abstract of 150-200 words should be sent to Sarah Marks by the 10th of February (sarah.marks@ucl.ac.uk). Please do not hesitate to contact us with any queries.

Oldies but goodies

While it may seem very retro in the days of Web 2.0, I still subscribe to several listservs and still find them of considerable value in ways that I'm not sure all the exciting new ways of online interaction can really replicate. Though possibly these days I do a lot more skim-reading or deleting on the basis of subject line than I used to.

There was a particularly interesting (at least to me)  discussion recently, which ranged across both VICTORIA and H-Histsex, about whether society women of the 1880s would have known about syphilis, if so whether they would have talked about it, and in particular, would married women have discussed the topic in front of a younger unmarried woman.

My initial reaction was that unless they had had some involvement with the social purity movement and the campaign for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, probably not, in an era when doctors usually did not inform married women that the underlying reason for their ill health/failure to conceive/sequence of miscarriages or stillbirths was a venereal disease given them by their husbands.

However, it subsequently dawned upon me that the long-drawn out and high-profile Campbell v Campbell divorce case*, in which Lady Colin Campbell sued for divorce on the grounds of her husband's adultery, plus cruelty in the form of communicating syphilis to her in spite of having been cautioned about his condition by doctors, took place in 1886. She had already been granted a judicial separation on the latter ground a few years previously. It seems entirely probable that this sensational case - Lord Colin Campbell had cross-petitioned claiming multiple instances of adultery on his wife's part  - was widely gossiped about. Though in its syphilis-related aspects almost certainly in whispers, and not in front of unmarried women.

*This scandalous case is set in the wider context of Lady Colin Campbell's unusual and fascinating life in a recently published biography by Ann Jordan.