Facebooking Your Way In and Out of Tenure
"I want everybody here to be careful about what you post on Facebook, because in the YouTube age whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life." -Barack Obama, fifteen years too late for me
David D. Perlmutter recently followed up his July Chronicle of Higher Education piece "Facebooking Your Way Out of Tenure" with a sequel, "Facbooking for the Tenure Track." As someone with a sprawling Internet history dating all the way back to 1995 (when I was in eighth grade), whose recent blogging history predates my return to graduate school by two years and whose current blogging vacillates fairly wildly between partisan political advocacy, television and film reviews, Infinite Summering, and snarky linkblogging, this is the job market question that continually fills me with the greatest and deepest dread.
I have come to terms with the fact that Google knows who I am, and am hopeful in any event that the thousands and thousands of hits that come back for my name will deter that hoped-for tenure committee from doing too intensive a search of my archives. I don't use my blog to pick fights with people, I don't post inflammatory tracts or conspiracy theories, I don't dramablog or bare my soul, I don't post embarrassing photos of myself on Facebook or anywhere else, and I'm as respectful as I think a person can be of the ever-blurring boundaries between online discourse and traditional scholarship. (That sentence alone uses the word "I" more times than twenty of my typical blog posts.) What's more, my blogging and Facebooking have brought me several distinct advantages to my work: they are, among other things, exceptionally good venues for making and keeping professional contacts, both nationally and worldwide, and my blog tagging history is a wonderful personal research index. (I only wish I could tag everything else I read in the same way!) In my pedagogy, too, I'm finding as others are that class blogs can be an extremely useful tool for out-of-class participation and writing assignments, and I'd hate to give them up just as I'm getting started in the name of self-protective paranoia.
In a generation of near-universal Facebooking, with countless and ever-increasing numbers of academic and Theory bloggers (not to mention places like HASTAC and The Valve), I have to assume my blogging won't cut too harshly against me -- at least that it won't make or break me. But I worry nonetheless that my academic career may have committed suicide-by-blog before it even got going. As the norms surrounding this sort of thing change, will early adopters of Internet communication technologies face punishment on the job market and from their tenure committees? Will we, on the other hand, maybe get a "blogger's bonus" in our future job searches as the study of New Media technologies become more and more important? Does anyone have direct experience with this sort of thing, one way or the other? And don't Perimutter's suggested self-disciplining norms go rather farther than they need to, in an era when even distinguished professors are now fervent and unrepentant bloggers?
- gerrycanavan's blog
- Login or register to post comments
By Their Facebook Pages Shall Ye Know Them
As a compulsive blogger and Facebooker, this question is very interesting to me. I would say, off hand, that given the parameters you've set for yourself as described here, you're fine. A too-candid negative book review in a scholarly journal could get you into far more trouble than a snarky line in a blog, I believe. The basis of my belief is that the kind of person who will judge you harshly on line may not take your digital presence as seriously as s/he would take a negative review in a scholarly journal. That's just a hunch.
Yet, that said, people will find any and everything to hold against you---and any and everything to vouch for you. In other words, in this as in all discussions of technology, the answer has to be "it depends" (and, perhaps, "always historicize"). I think when you go out on the job market, you will be historicized by your age, your blog, your HASTAC Scholar status, and many other features of your human "portfolio." It all goes together. Any ungenerous person may find something to pluck out and criticize but that could be the shirt you are wearing that day or a blog comment from four years ago. And the positive, reverse side of this is equally true. ("Love that shirt! Oh, and that blog on . . .")
So did our President mislead the kiddies? Not at all. The part that is creepy-scary is that kids can tyrannize one another pretty badly and some of that can go on the Internet. Still, I think we are moving to a social moment where we pity rather than condemn. If sex tapes are now the requisite initiation rite of any young star or starlet, maybe the intemperate digital snark-fest revealed to one's future profs and colleagues is the academic equivalent. What once shocked is now getting so commonplace as to be pro forma and, eventually, may even be laughably old-fashioned.
Or so one might hope . . . What do others think?
sex tapes and snark-fests
I couldn't resist the temptation to make your "intemperate digital snark-fest" line the temporary tagline for my blog. Strange as it is, now that you've said it the Hollywood sex tape strikes me an almost unavoidable metaphor for the fledging scholar's online prehistory. And it could go retro faster than we might think -- Twitter and Facebook status updates, while nominally public, are extremely ephemeral; they simply aren't Google-accessible in the way blogs and LiveJournals are and they probably never will be.
My Digital Trail
I worry about this as well! When I was in college, I had no qualms about posting pictures on Facebook or writing messages on my friends' walls. Now I am much more careful.
Facebook, however, feels more under my control because my profile is set to private (wishful thinking?). Twitter is a different story. I have kept my Twitter account unlocked because I want anyone and everyone to see my thoughts on digital humanities, book history, etc. I joined Twitter largely so that I could be in conversation with other academics. I rarely tweet about personal things. The problem is that my friends have also joined Twitter. They follow me, and I follow them back. I want to respond to their tweets but I am also conscious that everyone on the Internet can see what I post.
Part of me wonders if I should have two Twitter accounts, one professional, one personal. Does anyone else do this?
Chi.mp (an "identity management platform") has a cool feature where you can create different "personas" for work, family, and friends, therefore controlling who sees what information. But it only really works if everyone you know is also on Chi.mp...