2026-2-12
My thesis purported to be about 'online community' - how Twitch streamers made it, found it, kept it, and grew it. It adopted the same underlying logics of the Twitch platform: that socializing is commodifying, that playing together entailed paying together, that the platform facilitated human cultural activity because it ultimately made money.
I tried very hard not to fall into cynicism while staying critical. Anyone who studies online platforms (or thinks about them) is no doubt familiar with the difficulty of seeing good online communities lose the fight against platforms' commodifying their mutual affections.
In 2026 I feel simultaneous kinship with CMC scholars of the 1990s and 2000s and alienation from most of their enthusiasm. CMC scholarship, or HCI, or ICT, focuses a great deal on the psychology of computer-users in different settings and combinations: local, remote, communal, isolated. Users are hyperpersonal or ambivalent, disassociated or parasocial. Newer scholars like myself must attend to these fundamental theories because there are already a lot of reinvented wheels rolling around filling up space. Better to acknowledge all the good work that's been done before, and even spend some time despairing over whether there is anything new to be said.
(A different essay topic, but I'd encourage new scholars to think not of saying something 'new', but saying something already known and say it better -- most old scholarship is heavily tied to its era, written in a way that even 20 years later sounds out-of-touch).
Kinship with Old Theorists
So the kinship comes first in rediscovering in field work or reading ideas you yourself have had; suddenly Goffman or Habermas don't sound so strange. A new question or mystery comes up, and then you read a text from 1976 that gives it a name that makes sense to you - Lasch was right, we are all becoming narcissists, culturally so, in a way that we recognize and even expert one another to participate in...and Twitch streamers are simply especially talented narcissists...and so on.
But like a true family, kinship comes with equal portions of alienation: what was said before is not quite what you see going on. Or perhaps the emphasis seems somewhat stupid (Williams sure was confused by TV ads), naive (McLuhan didn't mind capitalism?), or myopic (Manovich is really into software features). The mood goes dark, the tone superior: I am alive, here and now, these writers have no idea how it is, the problems they faced are over; the problems of today are harder.
I am not sure of another path through a literature review except that experienced by children or younger siblings in stages: first awe, then admiration, then disillusion, outright rebellion, experimentation, and then...after maybe multiple cycles of this...a 'right-sizing' of the other's ideas and personal categorizing of their influence and contribution to your own. A family tree of theorists emerges, a strange pet project of its own. Like finding music bands or artists in adolescence, finding one's critical tribe in theory is awkward and jittery. I spent two years mystified by McLuhan; another two by Lazzarato. I realize now I was vulnerable to totalizing theories, the kinds of epistemologies that appear to predict the future before it's happened, or at least sound confident when it comes.
Theory in the real world is dead. Dead as in inert, expired. Maybe the best theories can be said to be mummified: at one time alive (Barthes' semiotics; Foucalt's discursive rebellions), but now a bit stiff and musty. They need a witchy blend of fresh oil and new blood, like Fuchs tries with Marx. The effect is a hypnotizing sub-genre of somnambulistic deja vu essays, digging up Smythe or Hall and in New Media Studies, making them dance for the internet.
Found Families
I studied online community in my thesis and it's likely the influence of that which has made me see much of academia as a network of moody online communities. At conferences you can see people glob in and out of little gaggles of peers, shakily introduce themselves to contemporary luminaries or, my favorite, finding intentionally remote chairs in under-crowded workshop sessions, chiming in when discussion seems relevant to their latest paper.
I also did my PhD entirely remotely; online and at a distance, working full-time in a country foreign to me, my participants, and my advisors. Had the experience been any more 'remote', I think it could not have been sustained. I was at the maximum distance to advisors, peers, and conferences for nearly the entire time. The drawbacks of this are easy to imagine. The advantages perhaps less so: what I see at conferences are not necessarily peers, but citizens of a foreign country, that country of in-person office hours and campus coffees, long walks and even longer talks in specific, myopic corners of a vast world. Basically: sheltered academics splitting their time between complaining about how hard their topics are and wondering aloud why no one cares.
Not to throw dirt on it: I wish I had been there. It's a truism to say that the only thing worse than being a minority is being a minority who is all alone. Academics are a minority in the world; some disgustingly more privileged than others but, set against a world increasingly disenchanted with institutional education and suffixes made out of certificates, we all of us look a bit off to the working, the earning, or the wandering.
I still haven't figured out how to write about my loneliness doing the degree; all of this can be a step forward in that understanding. At least one part of it is what this essay is about: the 'found family' of academ-fluencers imitating the online communities they presume to understand.
Ugly neologisms
They are apparent even to an outsider looking in at media studies: the new words and phrases glued together and then in place by scholars. And in my area, it was mostly about labor: hope, affective, aspirational, visibility, fame. There is precisely one moment when these terms are exciting: when as a student you encounter one of them for the first time. Ideally the one you see first is 'emotional labour', commonly used to the point of being ridiculous, like the word 'romcom' in film writing. This is, I contend, still the best term, and not because it was first but because it's intuitive in a way none of the others are. It's also deeply perverse in exactly the way I think its creator intended: it cuts right to the 'heart' of the matter and tells us work will eat up whatever we have in our bodies if we allow it or want it to. And it can flop around, applying just as much to how US Americans have therapized themselves into and out of relationships with their jobs and other people (or both, as the two are equally essential in some Americans' minds).
But I don't want to take up space picking my favorite and saying why. Who cares?
Instead I want to describe what it's like as a student new to the field to come across this little laundry list of terms, usually appended to a punchy clickbait title quoting a 'labourer' of some kind, and then to meet the authors of these terms at conferences and watch them pointedly avoid using the word they made up.
In short: it's like watching a band avoid playing their hit single, or a magician dancing during a magic trick. It's awkward, performative, entertaining, charming. The academics in new media studies have learned very well how to act like the influencers they write about. They blog and overshare on social media in a tortured post-post-post ironic, self-self-self-aware tone. They know how it looks to self-promote, they know what it means to coin a new term, and they know that it all feels rather put-on. Their awareness is not a shield, as it would be in the 1990s, but neither are they given over fully to self-exploitation, as they would do in the 2000s MySpace era. Some are digitally celebratory, like the 2010s campaigns of convenient revolutions via social media; #yeswecouldhave. But read a little on, listen for a while, and you'll see the education that differentiates them from their subjects (or, perhaps, objects) of study. You'll see the intellectual airplanes circling the airport, refusing to land precisely on a conclusion. You might feel as I felt: how much can people talk before they say something?
The answer lies in how much an academic sees themselves as a content creator. More talk is more content; more articles is more content; more conferences is more content. Scarcity is not a popular idea in contemporary academia. If mentioned at all, it is in discussing already-passed trends of mindfulness, meditation, and "vacation". The 'best' scholars have an article out every six months. Maybe it says something new, or maybe it doesn't. Like a YouTuber poring over video game rumors, or the differences in new lipsticks, the content process of academics is seasonal, not progressive. Having 'nothing to say' is not an option; one must write fiercely enough that it seems like iteration is invention. Hence papers ignore or call out the canon; they make ideological distinctions appear empirical; they pick new contexts for old questions and come up with unsurprisingly old answers.
The Cold War created political economists in most fields, whether they realized it or not. Social media creates influencers out of academics, whether they realize it or not. We are bound like everyone else to the overpowering cultural metaphors of the day.
Brevity is the soul of wit
To say most academics are witless is not shocking; to say they are soulless is unfair mainly for the reason that most are probably atheists, not looking to compete in a sport they don't believe exists.
Let's sidestep the ontological meanings of 'soul', and cut it back to what people mean when they hear a good song or a hearty laugh: this feeling of joy and insight that is all the more precious for its scarcity is what academics are at risk of losing should they 'subscribe' to the influencer model (pun intended). The fake agony over the observers' paradox, stumping stupid anthropologists for decades, should be funny to any student born after colonialism died. Unfortunately like a lot of scholars, colonialism was mummified and, like real mummies, has been occasionally snacked on by contemporary power centers. It's enduring, sickly grip on our imagination leads a lot of academics to really believe they are made too different by relative privilege to do 'field work' without a guilty conscience. So we spend a lot of digital ink saying how much we want to give participants a 'voice' in the work. And indeed we do give them a voice, whether they want it or not.
In an attention economy, academfluencers are turning empirical studies of small contextual practices into more content to grind against the wheels of people's eyeballs. We are coining terms to conquer SEO rankings and presenting at conferences not to be heard but to be seen. Waiting for my flight home after a conference last year, I passed the time watching colleagues post online about the life-changing talks and workshops they had just experienced. In solid Baudrillardian terms, it felt more real than the conference itself, as these peoples' emotions (supposedly) were on full and vibrant display, enriching their ugly photos with gushes of praise and admiration that could only be sincere at a high school graduation. I met these people; they don't talk like that in real life.
Let's end with a call: if all this is true or at least plausible, then academfluencers are set to travel the same route grooved into the digital earth by influencers themselves: brief and burning fame in the 2010s, followed by algorithmic torture and probable substitution by oozy, easy generative AI software in the 2020s. Influencers turned into human commodities accepting the market logics of algorithms. Academfluencers can do the same.