Veletsianos, G., & Shaw, A. (2018). Scholars in an increasingly open and digital world: Imagined audiences and their impact on scholars’ online participation. Learning, Media and Technology, 43(1), 17–30. http://ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/login?url=https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2017.1305966
What?
This study demonstrates that how scholars imagine their audience when they participate in online academic activities. Because there has not much research on scholar’s use of social media and the imagined audience, this study helps to understand how scholars conceptualize their audience. Through their literature reviews, the imagined audience can be conceptualized severally. Some bloggers regard their audience as themselves, thinking people who have similar interests and trait. The most SNS users imagine their audience as a specific audience who are their friends and family. In addition, imagination of their audience can be different depending on social media environment such as Facebook or Twitter. While people know their audience well on Facebook, users on Twitter imagine their audience as targeting audience specifically. In terms of the users who are scholars and use social media for academic purposes, the authors points out that there are some tensions in participating in SNS with a diverse audience of people. Also, the faculty might have a gap between their imagined and actual audiences.
So what?
This article is interesting to me as it gives me an idea to think about the imagined audiences and their impact. I am not a person who actively use social media with academic purposes but thinking about imagined audiences seems to be valuable to explore. My imagined audience is always friends and family in Korea. As I started to communicate with local people in Canada, I was thinking about writing my post in English. Writing or posting by SNS is obviously affected by imagined audience. Since I only use SNS as a personal thing, this article can be helpful to reconsider the scholar’s concerns about posting their research or expertise. Also, Scholars have also specific audiences in mind and they find collapsed contests problems and also it can be a practised intention.
Now What?
Using SNS allows scholars to share their knowledge with groups of peers and connect academic social networks as well as keeping up to date with related topics and discovering new ideas. However, it is important to consider there are growing concerns or desires for the separation of professional and personal lives. Personally, I have a little concern about kind of the permanence of the record or digital records in social media. The academia.edu site is very new for me and need to be explored.