Academic and Social Media in the Humanities: Guest lecture, MoHu Center, University of Padova, 04/05/2022

Résumé En

The recent covid-19 crisis has highlighted the paradoxical situation of public scholarly discourse: claimed and respected but also fragile and often unintelligible. And the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk on 25 April 2022 underlines the extent to which the issue of public speech is now inextricably linked to its exercise on social networks. If the first duty of scholars is to disseminate science to the public, where and how can this be done in order to be heard, listened to and understood? How to determine the ideal posture, between proximity, authority and rigour? The aim of this lecture is to- 1) briefly situate the question of public scientific debate and itsmodalities;- 2) evoke the technical revolutions that have enabled the currentdemocratisation of scientific debate, in particular the dissemination ofCMS;- 3) propose a few methodological and ethical avenues to define aposture of open scientific expression, while the GAFAM monopoly onsocial networks continues to grow and alternatives remain scarce and oflittle impact;The twitter network will be mentioned in particular, considered both as a place of a particularly developed scholarly sociability, and as a richfield of exploration and data to exploit for network analysis.