Why academics can no longer afford to stay silent, and what they risk by speaking up

Academics once enjoyed a comfortable remove from public noise. Authority accumulated slowly, through journals, seminars, and institutional standing. That distance has collapsed.

Consider what happened to Didier Raoult, the French microbiologist who became one of the most visible scientific figures of the COVID-19 pandemic. Whatever one thinks of his claims about hydroxychloroquine, his trajectory illustrated something larger: the speed at which digital visibility can elevate a scientist into a public authority, bypassing the slower verification mechanisms that peer review was designed to provide. Raoult did not merely communicate science. He became a media phenomenon, and the two things are not the same.

Andreas Hepp’s concept of deep mediatization helps explain why cases like his are no longer exceptional. Digital media is no longer merely a channel for transmitting messages. It has become the infrastructure through which people work, respond, build credibility, and decide what counts as important. Under those conditions, every profession eventually bends to its logic. This includes professions that once prized slowness, caution, and deliberate distance, such as academia.

Scholars who once chose silence now increasingly feel compelled to appear. They write opinion pieces, offer rapid commentary, open public accounts, and wade into conversations that move far faster than the scientific cycle permits. Some act from a genuine sense of public responsibility. Others have simply noticed that absence carries its own cost. In digital space, authority that cannot be seen tends to be treated as authority that does not exist.

The change runs deeper than communication style. It cuts to the heart of how professional legitimacy is produced. Where recognition once flowed primarily from peers, a growing share of it now depends on public legibility. A name that appears regularly in opinion columns, interviews, or online debates becomes recognisable as authoritative, often before the underlying research has been read at all. Visibility, in short, has become a proxy for validity. Whether that is a problem or simply a new reality is genuinely unclear. Probably both.

The line between material interest and existential need blurs at this point. Digital presence opens doors to projects, consultancies, networks, and professional opportunities. It also generates a subtler psychological pressure: the need to remain visible lest one fall out of the conversations that set the public agenda. In the attention economy, existence itself becomes a form of labour.

Everyday responses, too, are increasingly shaped by the media horizon. People judge issues not only through direct experience but through what is trending, shared, contested, or elevated by algorithmic systems. Even scientists trained in verification are not fully immune to this rhythm. During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, several prominent epidemiologists acknowledged that their decision to speak publicly was partly triggered by misinformation already circulating on Twitter, not by new data from the field. The media cycle had moved faster than the evidence.

This explains why an increasing share of academic writing in newspapers is reactive. It responds to what is circulating on social media rather than to what is happening in the field. Media does not merely report reality. It determines which reality feels urgent enough to explain.

Digital reality, however, is never neutral. It is shaped by social contest, competition for attention, and emotional intensity. What appears large is often simply what provokes the most interaction. Citizen grievances surface quickly there, sometimes more honestly than through formal channels. But they are also filtered through platform mechanics that reward conflict, speed, and repetition. The loudest signal is not always the most representative one.

Social media can therefore serve simultaneously as a social antenna and as a space of social distortion. It grants access to the pulse of public anxiety without guaranteeing an accurate sense of proportion. What goes viral is not necessarily what is most widespread. It is only what is most visible.

In an increasingly digitalised world, no profession can plausibly opt out of this logic entirely. The question is no longer whether to enter the digital arena. It is how to ensure that presence within it is not wholly determined by the compulsion to remain seen.

The greatest challenge facing academics today is preserving the discipline of thought inside a space that rewards speed over rigour. Speed is not inherently wrong. Rigour, however, is invariably the first casualty when staying visible becomes the overriding priority. That tension will not resolve itself. It requires a conscious choice, made repeatedly, about what kind of authority one is actually trying to build.