I'm revisiting here a toy-idea: that ugly portmanteau of 'academic-influencer', or academfluencer. I assume the meaning is self-evident, but I'll say one thing: online influence functions, I believe, like the gravitational field of a rock hurtling through space, picking up and dropping off tiny flecks of star dust as it goes. A rock with a little halo, in the dead of space. That's my operative image of 'influencing'. It is not truly 'influencing' at all, but rather 'orbiting' or perhaps 'wandering' around in search of a dusty consistent ring that will marry it to the cosmos.
So when I write academfluencers, I am thinking of academics who have spent the better part of the 2000s and 2010s online and have as a result internalized much of its logics. They seek attention and to become the gravitational center of others' intellectual lives, their north star for article topics, methods, and theory. The titles to their articles are pithy, sarcastic, or otherwise memorable. They coin neologisms at a constant rate, akin to influencers adorning posts with hashtags.
It isn't new, but it's got its own flavor. Journalists of 20th century wars wrote in hyperbolic absolutist terms. Every war ends a thousand times in headlines before it really does on the ground; likewise every war is about a thousand times as a violet in print than it is at any given moment. This is the nature of our mediated languages: more usually means less and at times of real horror we can barely speak. Academfluencers reveal how little they have to say by how much they want to write.
Were academfluencers really generating new knowledge, they might say less. After discovering social media is an attention economy (a discovery made sometime in the 1970s, again in the 1990s, and again in the 2010s), one can walk two paths: out of the network and back into real life, or deeper into the network, becoming part of it, another human reduced to memes, posts, and tweets.
'Theory-crafting' is the ugly baby of academic training and online addiction. Academfluencers product an an incredible amount of ethnographies, case studies, literature reviews, walkthroughs, and participatory observations reminiscent less of early 20th century anthropology and more of online fandom. There are 'communities' practicing 'resistance' against 'hegemonies', embodying 'representation' of 'minority' stances. Sometimes it has to be true; some people online are fighting for their lives. but more often we're looking at trends, not phenomena, ripples and not waves. So it goes with human culture. Most of it is boring because daily struggle would exhaust the soul. No accident, I think, that online scholars write and sound like message boards, underneath their jargon. Of course there are a lot of smart fans of Harry Potter, and there is no reason a Trekkie can't reason well and communicate philosophically. I'm not talking about the quality, but about the genre of this type of academic writing that I find so difficult to deal with. When articles are always already calls to action, and slices of slices of political fringes are bubbling up through what only appear to be mundane daily acts, a reader can either go schizophrenic trying to count up and comprehend all the 'meanings' pouring forth, or disengage into rigorous nihilism, making a protective shield around their own sanity. Put briefly now: academia is getting too much like Twitter.
It's probably a generational issue; this is my generation and staring it in the face is hard to do. It's hard to hear your own inner voice echoed in so many other people's work. It makes one feel less unique. More than that, it's frustrating to see authors do the work you want to, at a scale and volume you think you'd want to, and to have a career 10 or more years advanced for having done what looks like blog posts with citations.
The word for my feeling, of course, is bitter. It is hard to look at articles from the early 2010s and see in print the same questions and ideas I remember having in tiny, immature forms, at the same time. I was working with my hands all of the 2010s, starting a life I no longer live as a cook and educator. I was in close proximity more than once to people and programs I now cite. I'm not sure of an English term for this. It's not regret, nostalgia, or what-might-have-been. It's sharper edged, like what-could-have-been-changed, had I been more aware and engaged. Or it's a where-would-I-be-now had I jumped into the academic flames and gotten burned at a younger age. Would I end up a cook and educator anyway, weary of the navel-gazing armchair activism of over-grown political science majors now published professors writing again and again how bad Uber is? Would I feel old, so old, that by my 40s I'd be back at jobs meant for young people?
I'll wrap up soon, because bitterness does not taste good. If I really put myself back in the 2010s and try to think and feel as I did then, I recall that I was a habitual outsider. I sought then, as I do now, to occupy an angle tilting between common and rare practice, my view persistently slightly askance of others. I was obnoxious in thought, to put it one way, though usually interpersonally charming. I was not out to get people, or to seem edgy for no reason. I was genuine in going into used book stores and reading a weird assortment of titles. I was sincere in some of the questions I got from those books, but only had myself to ask and answer them, because I was aware they'd be annoying to most other people. I had enough sense to know that most people don't want to be students once they don't have to be. That I still did is probably why I got into education at all; in classrooms people are still students. In the working world, most people actively avoid learning.
I didn't go for those programs I knew were there, because I was scared. I was frightened of going from the clever person who really could do more with his life, to just another student fighting for grades and a job amongst the same peers and classmates who understood and related. I didn't want to compete in the game I should have been playing, because it was easier (and frankly more fulfilling) to live a more varied life as a part-time scholar, most-time young person in a big city.
And now, looking now at my dumb old hands and feeling my aching back, I am a good 10 years behind the cohort I might have been part of, publishing in my late 30s rather than late 20s, and again find myself the self-satisfied outsider, able to excuse any shortcoming in thought or deed by my being behind. I can use my age now, as my excuse, and cast resentment on anyone or anything who is ahead of me. As George Carlin said, I am living by the idea that anyone driving faster than me is insane; anyone driving slower than me is stupid.
I wouldn't change it, though. This is how I learned to drive and I'm still going.