The hidden costs of connectivity: nature and effects of scholars’ online harassment

ABSTRACT

A growing body of research reveals that some scholars face online harassment and that such harassment leads to a wide variety of adverse impacts. Drawing on data collected from an online survey of 182 scholars, we report on the factors and triggers involved in scholars’ experiences of online harassment; the environments where said experiences take place, and; the consequences it has for personal and professional relationships. We find that online harassment is heavily entwined with the work, identity, and in some cases, the requirements of being a scholar. The online harassment scholars experience is often compounded by other factors, such as gender and physical appearance. We build on prior research in this area to further argue that universities ought to widen their scope of what constitutes workplace harassment and workplace safety to include online spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Online harassment
• higher education
• economic vandalism
• survey methodology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 While we could have conducted an ANOVA to determine significance between groups, the small sample sizes in each group would violate the test’s assumptions. An alternative to this would be to group Caucasian vs. ‘Other’ (dummy variable coding all into a comparative group) that would still have unequal cell sizes but allow for some comparison. However, doing so would collapse all non-white individuals into a non-representative category and would undermine our efforts to illustrate the intersectional nature of these issues.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, grant# 430-2017-00104.