Intellectual escalation: The reversal of academia into activism

Post-academia mirrors postjournalism: both seek to represent the world not as-it-is, but as-it-should-be.

Digital reversals are cultural, ideological, and epistemological reversals brought about by the digital acceleration of social interactions. Read more in The Digital Reversal; the entire book is written in tweets (1,295 of them), making it the first “tweetise” in history—a reversal of the treatise.

In the print era, a scholarly paper took years to gestate, peer review felt like 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, both in speed and scale.

In the 13 years between 1992 and 2003, approximately 1.3 million open-access peer-reviewed articles were published.[i] In 2022 alone,[ii] the tally of published academic papers reached 5.14 million.

Preprint repositories let researchers share findings before peer review, enabling early feedback. The largest one, arXiv,[iv] started in 1991 and hit 2M papers in 2022—then added 0.7M more in just two years. Several other preprint services contributed over a million articles each.

The new infrastructure created an incredible influx of academic production. The benefits are obvious, but the pitfalls are substantial too—such as the rise of “predatory journals,” fake academic outlets with loose evaluation, which charge authors, undermining academic integrity.

The harm of “predatory journals” is well known, but other effects of accelerated publishing are less discussed—despite being likely more harmful. Beyond overload and declining academic integrity, the unprecedented surge in academic publishing brought the following outcomes:

• Citation inflation

• Self-reinforcing interdisciplinarity

• The fusion of publishing and publicity due to the spillover of academic activity onto social media

• Social contagion in sharing ideas

• And—resulting from all of it—academic activism

***

Citation inflation. What happens when the number of sources surges? It boosts knowledge—but also lets academic claims multiply faster than they can be verified. New hypotheses often can’t be tested due to lack of time, yet they generate an influx of bibliography available for further quotation.

In the print era, academic claims were 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 needed time for validation through criticism and consensus.

But when sources surge, a swelling bibliography creates the impression that numerous claims 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 largely shielded from this effect of escalated publishing by the need to test findings. But in the humanities and social sciences, citation cross-pollination has made some theories 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 essentially relies on proponents reposting, commenting on, and liking each other.

Curiously, cross-referencing, when pushed to its extremes, represents the reversal of citation into recitation—an essential feature of orality. In orality, recitation was, first, a collective memory device; and second, a proof of status and tribal belonging.

In literacy, citing serves a different purpose. Literate people quote to build on. It is not just mechanical repetition (except when it is, of course) but a reference for criticism or elaboration. Recitation serves to preserve knowledge; citation serves to expand it.

Therefore, when cross-referencing swells and reverses into recitation—serving only to reaffirm status and tribal belonging—it reintroduces a feature of orality into academia, turning it into a “tribal encyclopedia,” as Eric Havelock called Homer’s epics.[vi]

***

Self-reinforcing interdisciplinarity is another effect of escalated academic publishing: rapidly proliferating papers encroach on other disciplines’ territories. It boosts new knowledge. But pursuing intersections often becomes a value in itself, especially in the humanities.

In the Age of Modernity, a scholar could be called out for overstepping the boundaries of his or her field. Adherence to subject and methodology testified to rigor. (Of course, it also limited academic endeavor—no wonder discovery often happened by pushing those boundaries.)

Today, it’s hard to find aspiring academics proud of their disciplinary purity. Mixing disciplines has become a “must.” As disciplinarity fades, so does methodological rigor. When methodology isn’t anchored to a discipline, supervision relaxes. Too many cooks spoil the broth.

Interdisciplinarity for its own sake may lead to ambiguity in study subjects. Young academics often seek to tick as many popular interdisciplinary boxes as possible. This trend enables—and even mandates—social constructionism as a legitimate academic pursuit.

Neil Postman wrote[vii] 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.” This can be seen as an effect of TV on philosophy.

But Postman 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.”

Looping cross-referencing, a lack of reality checks, and self-propelling interdisciplinarity erode logic and hierarchies. Margins eclipse 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 become today’s dominant narratives. This is not the fault or transgression of specific authors. The entire paradigm shifted, favoring small but endless disruptions over big syntheses—the apex of postmodernity.

***

Fusion of publishing and publicity. Web 2.0 and especially the Digital Rush of the early 2010s enabled a massive import of academic topics, especially from the humanities, into public debate. It was a two-way road: academic matters spilled onto social media, and social media infused academia with virality.

Social media thrive exactly on “cross-referencing” and “interdisciplinarity,” providing users with ample opportunity for response and affirmation. That’s why academia easily absorbed the viral logic of social media, as soon as the boundary between the two began to blur.

Sharing academic links on social media became currency for an academic’s social capital. Using citations—someone else’s or one’s own—as proof of being right used to be frowned upon in academia, but social media have authorized it as solid testimony.

Academic production is the production of knowledge and privilege. Social media’s infusion into academia reinforced the latter, but not the former. The status effect especially benefited young academics, who could quickly gain public recognition for their views.

Things were different in the past: scholars could reach the public only through the media, which respected their expertise but kept it at bay, wary it might be too boring for broad audiences or advertisers. Direct access of academics to the masses was limited.

In the 1990s, as TV networks sought to expand 24/7 news coverage with commentaries, they gave rise to “public intellectuals.” Still, only well-spoken and establishment-aligned academics appeared on TV as talking heads. It was always the media that decided whom to broadcast.

Who needs authorization through old media now, when everyone can be media on their own? Well-versed in cross-referencing and interdisciplinarity—the traits so well suited to success on social media—digitized young academics formed a new chattering class.

Social media inaugurated the most passionate academics as self-promoted public intellectuals and made them influencers. Scholars gained the opportunity to convert their credentials directly into public status—and, vice versa, to convert popularity into credentials.

Academic ideas were put to a popular vote by likes and shares. It was the Digital Rush, when the user demographic—young, urban, educated—favored progressive views. Feedback from that “electorate” led to a major progressive shift in academia and its eventual political capture.

Robert Logan once noted that the orality of priests was paradoxically based on the Church’s literacy.[viii] Digital media had a similar effect on academia: digital publishing inherits literacy, but digital publicity turns it into preaching on social media—through digital orality.

The fusion of academic publishing and social media publicity may have pleased and promoted many academics 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.

***

Social contagion. Exposed to popular debate, academia both enjoyed viral dissemination and suffered viral backlash. As the line between publishing and publicity blurred, social media contaminated academia with their effects of virality and social contagion.

Never before had social contagion been a factor in academic production. Printing stewed academic ideas for years or decades before exposing them to the public. Besides, the writing style and format of scholarly books and articles made them incomprehensible to lay readers.

But the digital fusion of publishing and publicity converged the styles. Social media pundits understand that posts must be popular—how else can you get your likes and reposts? This pushes intellectuals to care more about likes than about the integrity of ideas.

Most importantly, the convergence 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 quick and powerful at capturing minds as viral stories.

“Theory becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses,” said Karl Marx.[ix] Public support—or repudiation—agitated scholarly debates, putting scientific ideas under pressure to win referendums by likes.

Winning viral support improved an academic’s standing within the scholarly community—but also within the broader public. The cheering (or “cancelling”) social media public—naturally highly politicized—emerged as an important referential group for academics.

On digital media, an affordance for both popularity and ostracism emerged. Immersed in an agitated and politicized environment, academics began transforming research into advocacy. The environment favors flipping the pursuit of truth into the adjudication of truth.

***

Academic activism was an inevitable outcome of the accelerated cross-reference validation, the self-reinforcing pursuit of interdisciplinarity, and the fusion of publishing and publicity.

Just as the blogosphere and social media drove journalism into postjournalism, digital media have reshaped academia—hitting the humanities hardest. Post-academia mirrors postjournalism, indeed: both seek to represent the world not as-it-is, but as-it-should-be.

It’s tempting to pin the blame on politics, but the real driver was this 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 institutions and fuels science denialism. 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.

Another negative outcome was that the growing political involvement, often even the political capture of academia, naturally backfired. After Trump’s return in 2024, academic activism made universities a target of political attacks from the authorities.

In turn, resistance to these political attacks legitimized academic activism even more, creating a politically self-reinforcing loop. The political cause took root inside academia itself, justifying the shift of many academics into political operatives.

***

Media evolution has been cooking academic activism for decades. When radio and TV shifted focus from content delivery to catering to audiences, they placed group identity front and center. This ushered in postmodernism, with its focus on identity and roots in academia.

Unlike the more conservative professoriate, young academics have always leaned progressive. Since 1968, the campus—not the congregation or the working class—has become the cradle of revolutionary movements.

During the Vietnam War, however, student protests were a form of political, not academic, activity. Political activity on campus hadn’t yet become academic activism—the politicization of the campus remained separate from scholarly inquiry into objective truth.

Postmodernism—an effect of electronic media—favored disruption as a cultural and artistic pursuit. Those studying it in the 1970s became professors in the 1990s, turning the disruption of grand narratives into the only grand narrative known to their students—today’s professors.

Finally, digital media unsealed the ivory tower, legitimizing validation through activism as an academic pursuit. In the early internet era, activist topics in academic journals were seen as breakthroughs. Twenty years later, academic articles lacking activism look outdated.

Escalated publishing—further corrupted by social media publicity—seduced supposed leading thinkers into becoming opinion leaders, who often saw themselves as mentors in a re-education camp for the masses. The masses mostly didn’t like it and fired back when they could (Trump).

The greatest social effect of academia’s digital escalation is likely not academic activism itself, but people’s reaction to it: science denial. It’s better—healthier—to recognize it for what it is: a media effect, not a human failure. It’s not people; it’s media—blame it on media.

Read more in: The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution.

---

See also books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

---

[i] Björk, Bo-Christer, Roos, Annikki. and Lauri, Mari. (2009). “Scientific journal publishing: yearly volume and open access availability.” Information research, vol. 14 no. 1, March.

[ii] Curcic, Dimitrije. (2023, June 1). “Number of Academic Papers Published Per Year.” Wordsrate.

[iv] arXiv Monthly Submissions.

[vi] Havelock, Eric. (1963). Preface to Plato.

[vii] Postman, Neil. (1999). Building a Bridge to the 18th Century. How the Past Can Improve Our Future.

[viii] “Although the internal organization of the Church was hierarchical and based on literary forms and codified law, the actual teaching provided to its parishioners was almost totally oral... The oral bias of the Church’s services tended to reinforce the corporate tribal spirit of compliance to the authority of the storytellers or bards, namely, the priests.”—Logan, Robert K. (2004 [1986]). The Alphabet Effect: The Impact of the Phonetic Alphabet on the Development of Western Civilization. P. 208.

[ix] Marx, Karl. 1844. Contribution to The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. The Introduction.