Quietly coping: The impact of online abuse on research innovation and knowledge workers in research and public education

Abstract

Social media platforms have been widely embraced in the research and public education fields for the opportunities that they afford for information and knowledge mobilization, public engagement, collaboration, and innovation. However, alongside these affordances, online abuse has emerged as one of the detrimental consequences of social media technology. For knowledge workers in research and public education, online abuse is an increasingly common workplace hazard that they must navigate. In this short paper we detail the preliminary results of a systematic and thorough review of the academic and grey literature concerning online abuse across a wide variety of disciplines to understand how the integration of social media technologies have created new risks and responsibilities for knowledge workers. Our preliminary findings indicate that knowledge workers deploy a host of private, daily mitigation strategies to cope with the online abuse they experience while conducting their work and to mitigate its potential damage. We call this phenomenon “quietly coping”. These findings also suggest that the individualized coping mechanisms that workers adopt may be symptomatic of a broader culture of institutional indifference, where reports of online abuse have been met with derision and sometimes punishment. Quietly coping underscores that the burden of online abuse is being shouldered by individuals, raising important questions about responsibility, accountability, and stewardship in technological innovation. Implications and future work are discussed.