Friday, May 23, 2025

"Academic Activism as an Effect of Digital Media"

From Andrey ("ecologist of media"*) Mir at Discourse magazine, May 21:

The social media forces of virality have irrevocably changed the nature of academia 

Academics were once the slowest talkers in the room, the purveyors of long papers, slow journals, ideas tested over years. That’s ancient history. Digital media sped up academic publishing and fused it with social media publicity. These days, a seemingly academic claim can go just as viral as a TikTok dance. The line between thinking and trending is thinner than ever. The question is: Does digitally agitated academia still seek truth—or merely adjudicate it?

Accelerated Academic Publishing

In the print era, a scholarly paper took years to gestate, peer review felt like it took place in geologic time and only librarians knew how to hunt down an obscure journal. That world is gone. Digital media—ever‑hungry, ever‑faster—turbocharged academic publishing in both speed and scale.

In the 13 years between 1992 and 2003, approximately 1.3 million open-access peer‑reviewed articles were published. In 2022 alone, the tally of published academic papers reached 5.14 million. As production costs fell, tons of new journals emerged. The number of academic journals has doubled from 24,552 in 2001 to 46,736 in 2020.

Preprint repositories allowed researchers to share findings before they had gone through formal peer review, fostering early feedback. The largest one, arXiv, started in 1991 and crossed the 2 million mark in 2022—but added the next 0.7 million papers in just over two years. Another one, SSRN, accounted for 1.5 million papers, and several other preprint services contributed over a million articles each.

This new infrastructure of academic publishing created an incredible influx of academic production. The benefits of intellectual escalation are obvious, but the pitfalls are substantial too. One of them is the rise of countless “predatory journals”—fake academic outlets with little to no evaluation that charged authors eager to publish, undermining academic integrity.

The academic community is generally aware of the harm caused by predatory journals. But other consequences of digitally accelerated academic publishing are less reflected upon, despite likely being even more harmful. Besides publication overload and declining academic integrity, the unprecedented surge in academic publishing has led to the following outcomes:

  • Citation inflation;

  • Self-reinforcing interdisciplinarity—in the escalating academic race, researchers often struggle to find real issues, so they try to guess the next big trend and construct new subjects, manufacturing bizarre topics;

  • The fusion of publishing and publicity due to the spillover of academic activity onto social media;

  • Social contagion as a leading factor in idea dissemination; and, resulting from all of it,

  • Academic activism.

Citation Inflation

Academic citation has always served two main purposes: knowledge accumulation and status validation. On the one hand, scholars cited other authors to connect theories, support or reject them and weave new knowledge on this basis. On the other hand, referring to authoritative sources reaffirmed a scholar’s expertise within a discipline. This status-affirming function of citation was important, too, as it demonstrated that the scholar had spent sufficient time and exhibited the diligence required to study essential sources.

What happens when the number of sources surges? It boosts knowledge, but it also allows knowledge claims to multiply faster than the capacity for reality checks. New hypotheses simply can’t be tested due to lack of time—yet they still generate an influx of bibliography available for further quotation.

In the print era, academic knowledge used to be validated by data, sampling, tests, surveys, applications and practical outcomes. Only a few disciplines, like philosophy, relied mainly on reasoning and referencing—but even they required time for validation through criticism and consensus.

But when the number of sources surges, a swelling bibliography creates the impression that numerous claims and hypotheses are already accepted as scholarly consensus—well before any reality check. The temptation grows to use quotes as proof. The validation of a paper increasingly comes from other papers.

Hard science is more or less protected from this effect of escalated publishing by the necessity of testing findings and working with data. But in the humanities and social sciences, citation cross-pollination has rendered some theories entirely self-referential, with their provability resting solely on scholars quoting one another. These conditions favor groupthink—just as flat-earthers cite other flat-earthers as if referencing established knowledge. The entire theory rests, essentially, on proponents reposting, commenting on and liking each other.

Self-Reinforcing Interdisciplinarity...

*Previous links to Andrey Mir:
....I'll get off this Andrey Mir, post-journalism kick, I promise. But not yet. (shades of St Augustine)

The reason for my borderline obsession is the fact that mass media has changed so dramatically over the last five or ten years, which makes it imperative to understand and possibly channel the forces that attempt to shape our everyday view of reality. And it really is getting close to the point that the call to arms "If it isn't censored, it's a lie" is a description of what is going on.

And that would be a shame, we like journalists and, among other reasons, get some of our best ideas from them.

Posted by at