Hanging out in social media for scholarly purposes provides PhD researchers with opportunities for getting a taste of open and networked scholarship practices as well as coping with the practices of researcher as ‘self-entrepreneur’. In the former, an exploratory stance can complement and/or expand the shaping effort of what being a ‘digital academic’ might be for the individual researcher in formation. In the latter, the emphasis on quantified self as an academic is linked to the idea of an accelerated shaping of an academic branding. 

This talk draws from recent qualitative research on individual Italian and UK-based PhD researchers self-organizing their digital engagement through social media, and discusses the extent to which they 'act upon' or are 'being acted upon' through their social media practices. The interviewed PhD researchers in fact reveal oscillations between the individual attitudes of disclosing or undisclosing their own online academic presence, weaving or splitting their personal/professional/academic identities and emulating or keeping distance from real examples of successful academic presence across digital networks. These varying attitudes are understood as emergent trajectories depicting the PhD researchers’ digital engagement.

The performance of academic identities arising from the data is inflected according to six interrelated dimensions: space, time, digital identity, socialization, stance, and tensions. The discussion of the negotiations of technology and practices through the lenses of these dimensions helps to identify four main forms of resilience on the part of PhD researchers toward the competing pressures arising from scholarly engagement online: staying afloat, pursuing convenience, embedding the digital and researcher as bricoleur.