Here are more thoughts on academic life! Episode 12 is at your service: What the university has that cannot be delivered Two episodes ago I argued that the university’s peculiar gift is slow time — the licence to sit with a question for fifteen years. In the last one I argued that its other gift … Read more
Ethnography, more important than ever The generative systems that have arrived in the last few years are extraordinarily good at a particular kind of intellectual work. Ask one of them what a body of literature says, and it will -mostly properly- summarize, cross-reference, and organize the written record with a facility no human scholar can … Read more
In nine episodes (you can find them here), I have focused on some characteristics of the current academic life that is killing the university system -not any more- slowly: Nine episodes of administrative bloat, ranking obsessions, funding regimes that reward the wrong things, accreditation rituals nobody quite believes in, a journal hierarchy that has turned … Read more
Whose Truth Gets Optimized? AI and the New Epistemic Order This is an edited version of my keynote talk delivered at the IV. International Communication, Digitalization and Society Symposium (ICDS), Istanbul Aydın University, April 28, 2026. The theme of this year’s ICDS symposium — Truth in an Optimized Society: From Democracy to Infocracy — is … Read more
I attended the Artificial Intelligence, Manipulation, and Media Literacy Summit in Cyprus yesterday. Session 3 was in a question-and-answer format, which I prefer to just speaking. I asked Claude.ai to format my answers. I have to highlight that this formatting misses the anecdotes and lively occasions. Well, those who attend get the benefits. Still, for … Read more
Here comes the new episode for Thoughts on academic life There has always been self‑promotion in academia. People mailed offprints, boasted about books, dropped famous names at dinner. But the contemporary landscape is qualitatively different: platformized, metricized, gamified.[6][8] Academics now operate across multiple, interconnected arenas: Citation and profile platforms: Google Scholar, Scopus IDs, ORCID, ResearchGate, … Read more
A few days ago, I was invited to serve as a panelist at a RESAID project (“Creating Societal Cognitive Resilience Against Information Disorders – RESAID”) event. This EU-funded project has substantive online course content and has developed a few online games related to disinformation issues. The panel was reported by AA as well. Here are … Read more
It was my birthday yesterday, and I am 49 now. As my close friends know, I prefer my routine life. I am a bit stressed with non-routine days, and accordingly, I am not excited to celebrate my birthday at all. Still, it is good to be beloved, and I know that I have my people … Read more