Why I dislike TAG, and why I dislike social media

I saw a tweet a week or two ago about the upcoming TAG ("Theoretical Archaeology Group") conference. I made an offhand negative comment, which set off a series of negative tweets about me. 

"Wow, not a single session I'd want to attend! Am I just out of it, or is "theoretical archaeology" out of it???

I tried to engage with my critics, but it just led to accusations that I am a troll and a bully. Finally I tweeted "I give up." So, I thought I would put down some of the reasons I dislike TAG, and some comments on social media.

Social media first. 

Here are a few things I dislike. Please note that my reference here is social media in relation to professional and scholarly issues.

(1) Ad hominem attacks.  As soon as I made a negative remark about TAG, I was attacked personally. I must be a bad person. I should shut up. This attitude is antithetical to science and scholarship.

It's really unfortunate when senior scholars would rather bully and troll than actually have conversations.

I guess my initial tweet shows that I am a bully and a troll. Huh??

(2) Sensibility is more important than facts. My tone of voice had negative overtones (which shows I am a bad person). Maybe I should be more careful in my phrasing so as not to suggest anything negative about anyone or anything. 

came across snooty, elitist and arrogant. Like othet people's ideas arent good enough for you

This is TWITTER, with short cryptic statements. I don't agonize over proper phrasing. I tend to be a direct person, and I try to express myself clearly. Again, the dominance of sensibility over content is antithetical to science and scholarship.

(3) There are "Like" buttons, but no "Dislike" buttons. This is built into social media today. You can like something, but there is no way to express dislike other than some kind of comment or textual response. Criticism and questioning are of less importance than joining a band-wagon. Again, this attitude is antithetical to science and scholarship.

TAG

To start with, if you care about how I think about theory, science, scholarship, and archaeology, please read my publications. I am a scholar, and what I say in Tweets (and in this blog) is ephemeral. I do discuss real issues here, but what matters is the published record. So, please look at the three papers cited below for my views on theory. These should make it clear why I dislike TAG. But here is a quick version.

First, for me, theory is a tool, something archaeologists use to learn about the past. The domain of "archaeological theory" is pretty small (ideas about formation of the archaeological record, recovery methods, etc.), but the domain of productive theory for archaeologists is huge. It encompasses many disciplines, from political science to ecology, from urban planning to geomorphology, from cultural anthropology to complex systems theory. For many or most people into TAG, archaeology theory is something important on its own, not just a tool to use to explain our findings. Instead of using theory to explain data (the norm in the social sciences), many archaeologists want to use data to "theorize" an issue. My goal is not to create more theory, but to use LESS THEORY (Besbris, Max and Shamus Khan,  2017,  Less Theory. More Description. Sociological Theory 35(2):147-153), or Healy, Kieran,  2017,  F**k Nuance. Sociological Theory 35(2):118-127.

Second, most theory considered at TAG is interpretivist, humanities-based high-level social theory. What is wrong with that? Read my publications. If you want to speculate about the human condition, such theory is great stuff, but if you want to provide rigorous explanations of human behavior and society, it is all but worthless. Please check the citations in my articles about this. My claims may seem outrageous to TAG types, but I am just repeating standard social-science epistemology. 

Here are some comments from my Twitter detractors.

(1) I should engage with TAG, go to a meeting. Here is my reply:

Because most TAG sessions are epistemologically incompatible with my own perspective. Not worth my time to sit through such sessions. If others care about my views, they should read my publications, e.g., ((I provide links to my 2015 and 2017 papers in the tweet)).

(2) I should open myself up to different perspectives and points of view

what's wrong with exposing yourself to new ideas? If you only ever listen to people lile yourself its kinda dull

I have spent a career listening to the postprocessualists, actor-network theory, materiality, and such, and I have rarely found much of use or of interest in this material. Yet given the trandisciplinary turn of my own research trajectory since moving to ASU in 2005, I would guess that I have exposed myself to more new ideas in that period than most archaeologists. Read my publications.

(3) I am arguing for a single narrow view of archaeology that excludes many, "including a lot of marginalized voices." My response to this has two components: (A) for the kind of empirical social-science research that I favor, I believe strongly that the kind of epistemology and theory I promote is the most productive approach. (B) for other kinds of approaches to archaeology, with other goals, other approaches are fine.

I appreciate a lot of your work, but you draw these boundaries and say that it's the only real or valuable archaeology and it leaves a lot of the discipline out, including a lot of marginalized voices. I think you can dislike something without being dismissive of it.

So, here we are back to sensibilities. If you care at all about these issues, please read my publications, and forget about Twitter (or this blog). You can look at my series of three posts about my view of a scientific archaeology:

Post 1

Post 2

Post 3

The 2017 publication covers these issues in a more compact form (although the blog posts do have much more complete bibliogrphies, given the limitations on the Antiquity paper). and the earlier papers have more on the structure of arguments (2015) and the nature of non-asbtract theory (2011).

Smith, Michael E.

2011 Empirical Urban Theory for Archaeologists. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 18: 167-192.

2015 How Can Archaeologists Make Better Arguments? The SAA Archaeological Record 15 (4): 18-23.

OR TRY:  Get it directly from the SAA

2017 Social Science and Archaeological Inquiry. Antiquity 91 (356): 520-528.

OR TRY:  The Antiquity website
OR TRY:   Prepreint on Socarxiv

I write a blog post. Students reply with a Facebook post. What is going on?

I guess I just don't understand the new world of social media. My previous blog post was a critique of Rosemary Joyce's lecture at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Then I see on Twitter that some anthropology graduate students have responded to my post, not by commenting directly on this blog, but in a Facebook post from the CUB Anthropology Department's Facebook page. Their post is mildly critical. I posted a brief comment on Facebook inviting them to reply directly on the blog (as a comment) to continue discussion. I say that I try to avoid using Facebook for professional purposes, and I am not anxious to start posting there about abstruse issues of social theory. But I haven't heard any more from the group of students.

(( SLIGHT UPDATE, same day, 9:30 am: Here is a link to the facebook post: 
https://www.facebook.com/CuBoulderAnthropology/?target_post=1247802748570251&ref=story_permalink.  And the likes are up to 34! ))

((Now, at noon, the likes are up to 39! I am really taking a killing here in Facebookland))

Perhaps in the world of social media and academia, all venues are equivalent. A response on Facebook might be no different than a reply to a blog, or some other kind of internet posting. So maybe I should just go ahead and reply to their comments here in my blog. Maybe I should switch to my other blog, Wide Urban World, to spread things around even further.

Or maybe I should just shut up. As a long-time blogger and senior scholar, I have a number of advantages over graduate students in terms of experience, power, and access. I am not anxious to play the heavy here. But then perhaps the students have an advantage over me. They are obviously more comfortable with Facebook, and they probably have other social media skills and experiences that I lack. So maybe I should shut up and admit defeat. After all, as of 8:00 AM today, there are NO comments on the blog post in question. The initial tweet from UCBoulder-Anthropology has 2 likes and 2 forwards, and my reply tweet has none. And the original Facebook post has 32 likes, including some prominent archaeologists and anthropologists. Wow, everyone is lining up against me.

In the court of Facebook opinion, I seem to be the clear loser in this affair. Obviously the "new materialism theory" (which is NOT materialist!) is popular and I am just a cranky positivist who can't see the light. But is this a productive direction for scholarship? I have complained in this blog about the "facebookization of online scholarship." You can "like" something buy you can't "dislike" anything. Popularity and superficiality are what count. What are the quality control mechanisms in the court of social media opinion? Are there any?

Well, this post is long enough. It doesn't really say anything about the substantive issues, mainly because I can't decide whether it is appropriate or useful to try to engage my critics in a dialogue, given the situation as described above. I guess I am still trying to figure out social media and its role in scholarship.

Academia.edu takes a step backward

I have been using Academia.edu increasingly. I now post all of my current papers there, and sometimes for displacement activity I'll take a few minutes to post some older papers. There are more and more people on the service, and it has turned into a very useful resource. A few years ago I posted,   'How useful is Academia.edu?" My evaluation then was generally positive, with a few negative features. Since then, they have fixed a couple of the negative features, and others don't seem quite so serious now.

It would be useful if all academics should set up a page on Academia.edu. I always urge students to set up their own page; its a good way to become an active part of a wider professional and intellectual community, to make yourself known, and to get access to current research. I won't urge colleagues to use the service, though. Archaeologists can be rather ornery people, and in my experience if you preach to them they will either ignore you or perhaps do the opposite.

But there is one HIGHLY NEGATIVE FEATURE on Academia.edu: Linked co-authors. You post a paper, and then invite your co-authors to link to it. Then the paper is listed with the various coauthors (and their logo and links) on your page. Sounds great doesn't it? The problem is that if your co-authors are NOT members of Academia,edu, then they won't be listed! You can list them in your own custom metadata on the paper, and of course they are listed on the paper itself. But it means that the basic listing for the paper omits authors.

• The listing is incorrect.
• It is unscholarly.
• It violates professional practice, and
• It violates scholarly ethics

Consider an imaginary paper:

"The nugatory puff as a cultural imaginary" by Foucault, Derrida, and Latour.

If only two of these authors are on Academia, the paper will appear like this:

"The nugatory puff as a cultural imaginary" by Derrida and Latour

 (assuming Foucault is not a member of Academia.edu).  I don't think Foucault will be too pleased, and authors Derrida and Latour should not be happy either, to have their paper inaccurately represented. Unless they are trying deliberately to cut Foucault out of the action........

Academia has at least thought about this, and you can add a non-member as a co-author and they will automatically invite the person to join. But I am not interested in harassing my colleagues to join a service. This is what ResearchGate does, and that is the main reason I resigned from that service.

If Academia.edu is going to portray itself as a scholarly resource, then they must adhere to professional standards and ethics in the way they portray papers.

Useful archaeology on Twitter ??

A couple of years ago I read a blog post by an academic psychologist (I forget now who or where) arguing for the academic and scientific benefits of using Twitter. She found new papers, found new colleagues, and improved her professional life. So I gave it a try. I signed up, followed some people, and spend a few months making an effort to find something useful. I did find some interesting current-events material, but nothing that could be remotely considered as scientifically or intellectually useful. I still have the account, inactive, in case things change in the future.

So, I was looking at an archaeology blog on the page of the American Anthropological Association, titled Archaeology in North America by Robert Muckle. He has a post titled "Archaeology in 140 characters or less," arguing for the value of Twitter. This is a somewhat odd blog, since the entries seem to be undated. Maybe the post was posted yesterday, or maybe it was put up ten years ago. I skimmed through the post and didn't see anything that might make me want to go back to Twitter.

But I did follow a link for post that supposedly tells scholars about the useful features of Twitter. This is Matt Shipman, in a 2012 post called "Scientists: Social Media Is Not Necessarily a Waste of Time"
on Scilogs. Here is Shipman's list of useful things about Twitter, and my remarks from the peanut gallery.

• "Discovering content online that is timely and relevant to my research and career."
• Tried that, found nothing. -MES
• "Discovering (and being discovered by) potential collaborators.
• Didn't find any collaborators -MES
• "Invitations to give research seminars and other talks, or to chair/moderate conference sessions, often involving free travel and honoraria.
• I get enough bogus invitations through email. I did not get any useful invitations on Twitter - MES
• "Invitations to write book chapters.
• Again, I get bogus requests through email, and none through Twitter. I would assume off the bat that any invitation through Twitter was not serious. -MES
• "Familiarity with disseminating the results of research to a broader audience using social media, which can help satisfy NSF's requirements for 'Broader Impacts' statements in grant proposals.
• I'm not sure just what the claim is here. I try to communicate my results to a broader audience, using websites, blogs, and various kinds of publicity outlets. So is using Twitter supposed to improve my outreach activity? This is one area where Twitter might be useful, and it is one reason I didn't cancel my account. -MES
• "Job and consultancy offers.
• Not looking for a job. No offers through Twitter. -MES
• "Content for my CV to demonstrate communication skills and outreach savvy.
• Again, what is the claim here? That I should put "Twitter account" on my CV to impress people? Give me a break. My blogs and websites are on my CV. -MES
• "Direct access to important people in science and government.
• Yeah, I need to communicate with Barack Obama so I'll try Twitter. Or maybe I missed a tweet from Steven Hawking.  -MES
• "Access to papers using #icanhazpdf (especially helpful now that I'm at a small non-profit research institution instead of a university department or large museum).
• So maybe someone with another institutional setting might find something here. But I get the papers I need through my university affiliation.  -MES
• "Getting near-instantaneous answers to questions ranging from technical troubleshooting to polls.
• I guess I just don't know how to do this. Maybe it is useful, I have no idea. -MES
• "Last but not least, an incredible amount of support and camaraderie, which has been especially helpful during my recent career transitions and a transatlantic, urban-to-rural move."
• I have support and camraderie from other sources. -MES

When I did use Twitter, I asked around about what I should do with it. Someone from my university suggested I use it to publicize my blog posts. I started doing that, but it seemed like wasting time. When I stopped using Twitter, a staffer in my department offered to Tweet for my blog posts. But then I posted one that was deemed too edgy for my program: "How to give a bad presentation at a conference." I was told that people might get the wrong idea and think I was promoting poor professional standards. Well, anyone dumb enough to think that was not someone I cared about. Now we have some new staff people, and they will tweet my blog posts if I ask them.

Maybe if I were a new scholar, not particularly well socialized professionally (that is, unfamiliar with Google-Scholar, with Contents Alerts, and such), I might find something on Twitter that is intellectually useful. Or maybe I am just a cranky old-guard dinosaur who doesn't keep up with what is happening in the world today. Twitter may be fine for the lads (quoting Bronze Age Orientation Day here), but for scholarship and research, I just don't get it.

How useful is Academia.edu ?

I've been on Academia.edu for a year or two now. Sometimes I am on the site several times a week, sometimes not at all. I initially joined as an experiment, and I have gained some things from it. A number of people have asked my opinion, so here it is. You should know that I am not an active user of Facebook, and I don't have a Twitter account; thus I can't really compare Academia.edu to the main social media sites.

Academia is useful for networking. I have been exploring other disciplines recently, as well as the archaeology of regions outside of my specialty, and I've made some useful contacts through Academia.edu, and I've found some useful papers posted. I don't use Academia.edu like Facebook to be "friends" with a bunch of people. On Academia, you elect to "follow" people, but the relationship is not reciprocal. I only "follow" a few people, mainly interesting scholars in fields distant from my own. I get a notice when people sign up to "follow" me, and I usually look at their pages to see if they are someone I might want to know about (I've met a couple of interesting people this way).

Here are some things I like and dislike about Academia.edu:


Mechanics: Pro

• It is easy to set up a page, and to modify and update your page.
• It is fairly easy to post papers.
• You can post "status updates." These are sort of like tweets (short statements), but perhaps less intrusive.
• Academia.edu pages and papers turn up very high on Google searches. Academia tracks these cases, and you can see how people are searching and how they find your stuff. There must be lots of term papers about Gordon Childe and the urban revolution, since my paper on that topic turns up in lots of Google searches. I learn interesting things, such as:

Today:  "45 people from United States found your page on Google, Bing, and Yahoo with the keywords: "ancient places starting with", "how did the military expansion of the aztecs impact their society", and "the expansion of urban commercial centers in the Aztec Empire " 


Two days ago: "48 people from Finland and Sweden found your page on Google and Yahoo with the keywords: "Foundations of Social Archaeology. Selected Writings of V. Gordon Childe", "+spiro interpretation +"the grid" +"grand manner " -book -bok", and "+"the grid" +"grand manner " -book -bok" and 45 more."


Mechanics: Con:

• Papers are posted using scribd. This is an awkward interface, both for posting and particularly for viewing and downloading. One's papers are not listed in a convenient format.
• There is no way to link dynamically to blogs. I would think that the kind of people who might follow me on Academia.edu might be interested in my blogs. I have generic static links on my "about" page, but I can't get dynamic linkages to current posts.
• There is a "news feed" when I visit the site. Some of this is activity by people I follow, but most is not. These must be second-order linkages, or people who follow me, I don't know. Some of this information is useful, but there is far, far too much junk that I don't care about. It's nice that people are posting papers on weird and obscure topics, but if they are not MY weird and obscure topics, I'd rather not have to wade through this stuff while looking for something that I might be interested in.
• People can post generic questions, that others can respond to. This is a good idea, but the format in which these are listed in the news feed prevents rapid checking of whether the question or answers are of interest or not. I usually assume the latter.

Intellectual Aspects: Pro

• Academia.edu is an excellent way for students to set up a quick website and establish an online presence (posting papers, research interests, activities, etc.)
• It is easy to include links to your main website, or other places.
• There is a nice element of serendipity in finding odd interesting things.

Intellectual Aspects: Con

• There doesn't seem to be a way to form interest groups, like on the Open Anthropology Cooperative. This feature could provide a solution to the problem of junk in the news feed.

Use by Departments

I'm not sure what to think about this. I've seen cases when a large number of people in a department all sign up at the same time, probably in response to some central call to action. This could be an answer to one or both of the big problems with academic departmental webpages. The first problem is outdated pages. Departments don't have the resources or expertise to maintain their websites, and most examples are out of date. Don't you hate it when you visit someones university website to see what they are up to, only to find that their latest publication listed dates to 2006? Also, some departments have website nazis who control and restrict information to the detriment of scholarship. Having pages on Academia.edu can get around bottlenecks like this.

It's less clear to me whether Academia.edu can address the second big problem in academic websites: the lack of posted papers and information. It is easy to post your papers on Academia.edu, whereas it can be a hassle on a centralized academic website. But the root cause of the problem is apathy by faculty members (and grad students). Most people simply don't want to take the time to post their papers. When that is the case, having a site on Academia.edu is not going to change things.

I think that if I was a faculty member, or better yet a project or research group, trying to set up a website more accessible and updatable than an unwieldy departmental site, I might start a site using a Wiki platform. When the website for one of my projects got too unwieldy and complicated, we moved it to a Wiki, which is easily updatable by anyone on the project  - you can see it here.). But that isn't the purpose of Academia.edu.

I don't know why any graduate students would NOT want to establish a page on Academia.edu, and I think it is useful for others to do so also. Look at it as a courtesy to your colleagues. If your departmental webpage is not what you want or need, then set up a page on Academia.edu. I happen to have a responsive and efficient department website, and I maintain my own university site. My usage of Academia.edu continues to be experimental, but the more people who join, the more useful it will be.