Academic Activism as an Effect of Digital Media
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
Escalated academic publishing also drives a surge in interdisciplinarity. As papers multiply, they encroach on other disciplines’ territory. This can spark insights and generate new knowledge. On the downside, pursuing intersections becomes a criterion of value in itself—especially in the humanities.
In the predigital age, a scholar could be called out for overstepping the boundaries of his or her field. Adherence to subject and methodology testified to rigor, but also constrained academic endeavor. No surprise, discoveries often happened by pushing those boundaries.
Today, it’s hard to find an aspiring academic proud of disciplinary purity. Mixing disciplines has become a “must.” As disciplinarity fades, so does methodological rigor. When methodology is no longer anchored to a specific discipline, supervision relaxes. Too many cooks spoil the broth.
Most worrisome, interdisciplinarity for its own sake leads to ambiguity about the subject of study. At scale, the self-propelling pursuit of interdisciplinarity enables—and even dictates—social constructionism as a legitimate academic pursuit. Young academics often seek to make up subjects of study to tick as many popular interdisciplinary boxes as possible.
Neil Postman wrote in 1999: “Jean Baudrillard, a Frenchman, of all things, tells us that not only does language falsely represent reality, but there is no reality to represent. ... You can get a Ph.D. in this sort of thing.” Postman had witnessed the effect of TV on philosophy. He did not live long enough to see what digital media would do to academia. Today, scholarly topics have become even more intricate—like “Queer canine becomings: Lesbian feminist cyborg politics and interspecies intimacies in ecologies of love and violence.”
Coupled with citation cross-pollination and the lack of reality checks, the massive pursuit of interdisciplinarity reshapes academic logic and hierarchies. Margins overshadow the center, the particular is confused with the general, anecdotal evidence defines systemic conclusions, and manifestos replace inquiries. In such conditions, many of yesterday’s marginal theories can’t help but become today’s dominant narratives.
Fusion of Publishing and Publicity
The digital acceleration of academic publishing coincided with another product of the internet—social media. The two overlapped: Academic discussions spilled over onto social media, and social media infused academic matters with the forces of virality.
The blogosphere and social media have always thrived on cross-referencing, providing users with ample opportunity for response and affirmation. Sharing academic links on social media became a currency for an academic’s social capital. Using citations—someone else’s or one’s own—as proof of being right might still be frowned upon in academia; but on social media, it’s solid testimony.
Academic production is the production of both knowledge and privilege; social media’s penetration into academia reinforced the latter but not the former. The status effect was especially favorable for young academics: They could now gain traction for their theories much faster, validating their place among the intellectual elite in the eyes of the public.
Things were different in the past: Scholars could reach the general public only through mass media, which respected their expertise but kept it at bay, wary that it might be too boring for broad audiences or advertisers. In the 1990s, as TV networks sought to expand 24/7 news coverage, they introduced the species of “public intellectuals.” Yet only well-spoken, well-connected and—most importantly—establishment-aligned academics could appear on TV as talking heads.
Who needs authorization through old media now, when everyone can become media for themselves? Well versed in cross-referencing and interdisciplinarity—the traits so well suited to success on social media—digitized young academics formed the new chattering class. Social media inaugurated academics as self-promoted public intellectuals and made them influencers.
Social Contagion
The fusion of academic publishing and social media publicity may have pleased some academics and promoted many of them into the honorable ranks of influencers, but it did not serve academia well. Direct access of academics to the masses ennobled the masses but laicized academia.
Most importantly, social media infected academia with their media effects. Virality—the essential mechanism of social media—poured into academic matters and brought social contagion with it. Academia became exposed to popular debate, enjoying viral dissemination and suffering viral backlash.
Never before had social contagion been a factor in academic production. The print era kept academic ideas and their social proliferation separate. But the digital fusion of publishing and publicity made theories and ideas socially contagious among academics, much like among regular folks on social media. Academic theories became just as powerful at capturing minds as viral stories.
“Theory becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses,” said Karl Marx. Public support—or repudiation—agitated scholarly debates, putting scientific ideas to referendums that were settled by likes. Winning viral support improved an academic’s standing within the scholarly community. The cheering (or “canceling”) public emerged as a factor in academic production. Academics began to transform research into advocacy. Seeking truth became adjudicating truth.
Good, Bad and Ugly
The accelerated cross-reference validation, the self-reinforcing pursuit of interdisciplinarity and the fusion of publishing and publicity could not help but make academia shallower and more politicized, sparking the rise of academic activism.
Just as the blogosphere and social media drove journalism into postjournalism, digital media have reshaped academia—hitting the humanities hardest. Postacademia mirrors postjournalism, indeed: Both seek to represent the world not as it is, but as it should be. It’s tempting to blame politics for this, but the real driver was a media effect: the digital acceleration of academic publishing.
That shift isn’t necessarily bad; after all, the humanities are meant to engage with public discourse. The bad thing is that old academic credentials do not reflect this change. A Ph.D. in activism still carries the weight of a philosophy degree, misleading the public about what counts as science—and doing no favors to science in general. This confusion contributes to the declining trust in academic institutions across a wide range of fields, from healthcare to sociology to cultural studies. The same kind of devaluation has happened to the once-proud title of “journalist.” It will take time for society to learn to tell the difference between science and activist academia.
Even worse, the growing political involvement, often even the political capture of academia, naturally backfired. After the 2024 presidential election, academic activism gave the new administration grounds for political attacks on universities. In turn, pushing back against the political assault from the powers that be legitimizes academic activism even more, creating a politically self-reinforcing loop.
The transformation of academia under the pressure of digital media is not a glitch to be patched but a structural shift that can’t be reversed. The forces that gave rise to academic activism—speed, virality, visibility, escalated social engagement and the collapse of traditional gatekeeping—are now permanent features of the media environment. The line between scholarship and publicity has been blurred for good, and any attempt to return to the predigital academic order would be futile. Still, while the problem itself may not be fixable, our response to it can be improved.
The only realistic way to deal with academic activism is media literacy. Its key components are awareness, rationalization and tolerance. Recognizing changes in academia as media effects, not as a political plot or someone’s ill will, can help avoid prosecutorial bias in judgment and soften polarization. It’s not people, it’s media—blame it on media.
One of the worst outcomes of academia’s digital escalation isn’t academic activism itself but how society reacts to it: rapidly growing science denial. It’s better—healthier—to recognize that activism for what it is: a media effect, not a human failure. Academic and public institutions could come to acknowledge it and revise their policies by accepting ever-growing science denial as a given—as a structural shift that is here to stay.
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