LinkedIn as Academic Wild West: Answerability beyond Institutions
For me, the value of publishing on LinkedIn lies in its speed and, more importantly, in the conditions it creates for dialogic exchange. Academic publication can move like molasses in January, often taking over a year from submission to publication.
Pubblicato il 29 marzo 2026
Citation and academic attribution are often treated as technical matters, reduced to conventions tied to inherited institutional norms and perceived as arbitrary. One follows them much as one wears a tuxedo to a wedding: because the occasion requires it, not because the necessity is understood. Once framed in this way, attribution begins to appear as a matter of etiquette rather than necessity—and like most etiquette, it weakens with distance from the settings that sustain it.
In this sense, academic publication on platforms like LinkedIn can begin to resemble a kind of Wild West: Removed from institutional centers of rule-bound convention, conduct shifts toward a free-for-all. And, as in other frontiers, this distance offers both freedom and risk.
For me, the value of publishing on LinkedIn lies in its speed and, more importantly, in the conditions it creates for dialogic exchange. Academic publication can move like molasses in January, often taking over a year from submission to publication. When writing about AI, where topics evolve weekly, work can become caught in a conceptual lag. Public posting allows me to timestamp my work and make it available for dialogic exchange.
At the same time, distance from institutions means that formal rules lose their reach, and conduct becomes a matter of ethics rather than compliance. The absence of visible enforcement can create the impression that the obligation itself has disappeared, rather than recognizing that it persists in alternate form.
Even style guides can entrench a form of institutional-centrism. One is required to cite social media posts and blogs in formal academic work, yet no corresponding rule governs attribution within those same platforms.
This asymmetry is also infrastructural. LinkedIn, for instance, imposes a 3,000-character limit and provides no architecture for footnotes or endnotes. Some use the comment thread to extend citation; I tend to name authorship without full apparatus.
This is a methodological choice. Part of my project involves performing the infrastructural constraints that condition production. As with the telegraph’s imprint on Hemingway’s verbal economy, the medium shapes what the work can become.
This structure places some practical limits on citation. For instance, if I reference Jacques Derrida, I name him in the post rather than provide a full citation of a specific text, reserving that level of apparatus for formal publication. If I develop an idea in response to feedback on LinkedIn, I identify and tag the source by name within the post itself.
In the absence of institutional structure, attribution marks an obligation to remain answerable to others for the consequences one sets into motion—an obligation that persists across infrastructural conditions, regardless of whether it is formally recognized or enforced.