The digital academic: Identities, contexts and politics

On 5 August 2016, a short piece for The Guardian online site provoked discussion among academics on its site and various social media platforms. While it would probably be going too far to characterise such debates as culture wars, they signify the growing use of social media and other digital media in academia. The expansion in the ways in which tertiary education can be offered online has led some academics to envisage the utopian possibilities for 'open education', offering this level of education to anyone with an internet connection and digital device. 'Big data', or the huge datasets generated by people's interactions with digital technologies, are often presented as creating great possibilities for enhancing social research and contributing to the development of professional practice. The ways in which academics communicate with each other and with students and the public are also transformed via the discursive affordances of social media and open access publishing.