About a year ago I started this blog and created a Twitter account and Linkedin profile. Now, it’s time for a little recap.

Required background: Interest in my life.^^

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I’m not much of an online guy. I had no smartphone until two and a half years ago and I have no instagram, facebook or whatever. However, I like to try out things, and I have been playing with the thought of writing a blog since many years, and I have always been curious about the possible impact of social media on my life.

In addition, in August last year I was also in the situation that, apart from one pending application, all of my applications were rejected (very luckily, the situation changed only a month later and the last application turned out to be a success). But back at that time I thought when if not now should I try out Twitter, Linkedin and a blog?

Below I will share my experience of this little online journey, mostly as a testimonial for myself, but perhaps some reader finds some value in it.

The blog

As I said, I wanted to write a blog since many years. While I certainly have hopes associated with my blog—such as gathering attention^{[aka becoming super famous]} or having scientific debates—I think the prime motivation for my blog is frustration about the rigid framework of academic publishing.

The all dominating academic publishing method are journal articles and I feel increasingly bored by them for various reasons, among them are:

• A (too) rigid framework of how a journal article has to look like (who betide you you don’t cite the standard references).
• Meaningless fights with uninformed referees who don’t take (have?) the time to actually read the article.
• A constant overselling of results (“we are solving a highly non-trivial problem”, sure sure).
• A culture of avoiding conflicts and debates in academic papers, even though we should do the opposite.

Luckily, there are some other options, such as perspectives, tutorials, essay contests, etc., but the entire structure is still too rigid and monopolized. Hence, I primarily view my blog as a way to free me up from all these chains. I can write about the stuff I like the way I like. Perhaps only five people will read my entries, but I do not believe that much more than five people read an average paper of me either. Indeed, I like to read blogs and listen to podcasts myself, and I find them as important as academic papers.

Twitter and Linkedin

Twitter and Linkedin are a whole different story from my blog. I literally never had a strong desire to be there. My motivation here was pure curiosity plus some despair in said August of last year. So, what’s my take away message from these social media?

Let’s start with the good things. Since I do not follow the arXiv and avoid most conferences, there is the fear of becoming isolated in the scientific community (I know that this is really not good, but I have my reasons for it). And in that sense, Twitter and Linkedin are great platforms. They instantly make you feel closer and more involved in your community. I got to know what other people are pondering about and there has been at least a dozen papers during that year that I would not have noticed without Twitter or Linkedin. Unfortunately, those papers just ended in the “to read” folder so far (if my memory is correct, I read one of these paper in detail)… Moreover, Twitter and Linkedin allow you to spread your own results and might increase the impact of your research. This is certainly an important aspect even though I would be curious to know whether there is any significant increase in impact for the average Twitter/Linkedin user.

Now, let’s turn to the bad sides, but skipping the big chunk of the much discussed dark sides of social media (addiction, bubbles, overwhelming bad news, excessive competition/comparison, and whathaveyounot). Then, one thing that is very irritating to me is to see those people who use these platforms to celebrate themselves. By “celebrating themselves” I explicitly do not mean the advertisement of concrete physical results (unless they are advertised in an overblown or ignorant way). Instead, I mean all kinds of self-advertisement that does not convey any scientifically relevant information (“look how many papers I wrote this month…”, “look how much I am cited…”, “look whose hand I am shaking…”, “look at what a cool place I am…”, etc.). Maybe it’s just me, maybe I am also mostly irritated by those people actually liking these posts, and certainly it’s a thin line to walk. But whatever it is, I certainly feel sometimes in disgust when visiting Twitter or Linkedin.

Finally, what do I like more: Linkedin or Twitter? For now, I have a slight preference for Linkedin: it seems more professional to me, it is more inclusive (less competition of who follows whom) and more flexible in the content (no length restrictions), but it also is a bit more annoying sometimes…

Future considerations

To conclude, this one year of significantly increased online activity has been interesting and mostly fun, even though it also required quite some labor (in particular writing the blog posts).

For the future, I want to continue writing my blog at a frequency of around one post per month. At least in principle I have a lot of ideas in my drawer… I also decided to stay on Linkedin and Twitter for now, but only because (thankfully) I feel no desire to check out these pages more than once a week. Obviously, there can be also weeks where I check them out twice or three times, but during my summer break I haven’t checked them out for 2,5 months and I didn’t have any FOMO feelings. I think that’s good news overall.