Rethinking Social Media
Or why I am here
As my casebook for promotion to full professor was being finalized, I spent some time thinking about where I wanted to go next with the focus of my work. The Department of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering at U of M is one of the smallest departments in the College of Engineering. Across the country, I can count the number of institutions that are doing extensive marine industry research and teaching and still have plenty of fingers and toes left over. Yet when we talk about national security, economic growth, and clean energy, the marine (and inland freshwater!) world is going to be central to what occurs or does not occur over the next two decades. While I had research and teaching challenges that I wanted to take on, a key part of the next phase of my career was going to be attempting to raise the profile, understanding, and number of people interested in the marine world. I decided to work more with students from other departments and do more public outreach beyond campus on marine issues. For the latter, I picked Twitter as my entry point and worked hard to build up a following online.
Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter was worrying, but I decided to ride out the storm and see what happened as things were mostly functional. The “X” rebrand was strange, but again, not impacting my use of the site. But then the NYT article noting that the re-brand included re-naming the conference rooms "eXposure," "eXult" and "s3Xy" caused me to re-think. Having worked hard to build inclusive classrooms, research teams, and academic spaces in my professional life, working hand-in-hand with an increasingly TechBro-promoting platform suddenly seemed counterproductive. No one needs to be invited to the “s3Xy” conference room or to a follow-up meeting in the “eXposure” room in a professional setting. The now well-known quote “The standard you walk past, is the standard you accept” seemed to apply. If I wouldn’t subject my students to this at Michigan, why was I focusing on this site? As I was debating if this would be the straw that broke the camel’s back and moved me from Twitter, I also realized that my tweets were mainly short. Looking back through my timeline, I was struck that I was not succeeding in building up a broader understanding of the marine domain. Sal Mercogliano’s wonderful What's Going on With Shipping YouTube channel, I think, clearly demonstrates that longer-form information is wanted in the marine space.
So I’ve decided to close my Twitter account and move to write longer-form posts, both here and on Post.News. I’ll work on both specialized topics of interest to those working in the field and more general posts.