"Why People Are So Awful Online": Roxane Gay, being right once again

In "Why People Are So Awful Online," Roxane Gay pinpoints something that we've been talking about for a while and completely nails it, as usual: 

In our quest for this simulacrum of justice, however, we have lost all sense of proportion and scale. We hold in equal contempt a war criminal and a fiction writer who too transparently borrows details from someone else’s life. It’s hard to calibrate how we engage or argue.

One person makes a statement. Others take issue with some aspect of that statement. Or they make note of every circumstance the original statement did not account for. Or they misrepresent the original statement and extrapolate it to a broader issue in which they are deeply invested. Or they take a singular instance of something and conflate it with a massive cultural trend. Or they bring up something ridiculous that someone said more than a decade ago as confirmation of … who knows?

Gay says "we seek control and justice online" and that's why we want our voices heard. True enough--but at what price? 

 The first paragraph especially resonates with what happens on Twitter. Remember the radical librarians getting all up in arms about Little Free Libraries? 

Today, Twitter is all up in arms again about titles--"should you call a professor doctor or professor or or or"--and though it's an important topic, and was fifteen years ago or so when people first started making an issue of it and talking about it endlessly, do we really need to revisit it quarterly? 

Maybe we do. Maybe this is like the old days of ChronicleVitae, when I used to get frustrated because it gave no new information and finally realized that it wasn't meant to be informative for people past the first year of grad school. The fault was with me for reading stuff I already knew, not the medium for putting it out there. Maybe Twitter is the same way.

Yet I confess that most of the time a subset of academic twitter is too "inside baseball" for me to understand at all. Shade is thrown, and subtweets proliferate like minnows, and knowing references are apparently caught by those in the know, of whom I am not one.

 It's all a bit like being back in junior high and not knowing what the cool girls were talking about, except that now I have neither the time nor the inclination to figure it out. As Gay says, she now has a life and family and can't spare the time. 

I've been writing about Twitter here for 10 years, and while nothing can touch the levels of misinformation and horror that the former guy brought to it, Gay may well be right about the level of negativity it has now attained.

5-minute post

Long time, no see! Following xykademiqz and gwinne, here's a 5-minute update post:

• Even if I don't get any vacation again this year (see also: heat dome, smoke, western hellscape), I have an autoreply all ready to pretend that I do, and I'm not afraid to use it. As an administrator, I never felt as though I could take the time to disconnect, but current & past administrators around me all have better sense about work-life balance, and if they're not on duty, they're emphatically not on duty.
  
• Have learned that it's totally easy to pretend that you want to go back to in-person conferences and the classroom this fall. Pro tip: Nod enthusiastically when people bring it up, and lie, lie, lie like a champ.
  
• Missing the land of no internets and adjacent waterways fiercely this year, which I suspect is standing in for other kinds of loss. Knowing that I might not revisit this region for years, if ever again, is something I try not to think about.
  
• My research right now is writing-adjacent rather than writing--necessary but rote work--and my brain needs to get back to writing. 
• Inside Higher Ed now wants you to sign in, just as the Chronicle does, so the bar of "is this worth reading?" is now a lot higher there as well. 
• Even a broken clock like Caitlin Flanagan is right twice a day, and she has a point about Twitter. Since the former guy is gone (thank God), it has devolved into a lot of in-jokes and fussy, pointless  fights about whether "best" is too curt as an email closing (previous post on this here). On the one hand, it's a good sign if people are consumed with such trivial stuff. On the other hand--can you say "waste of time?"
  

Tips for social media types

Thank you, sincerely, for all the useful things you all post on Twitter. I mean it. I learn a lot every day about resources that are available. I "like" a lot of things and repost many.

Thanks especially when you choose the most cogent or telling sentence out of the piece before posting a link. It really helps.

But when you say, without explanation, "this is a must-read," it makes me want to set fire to it.

Too many acronyms and abbreviations make my head hurt. There are hundreds of intelligent, literate people on Twitter whom I follow who don't use them, and if you clutter up your message that way, I'm going to skip your message and go on.

A Twitter essay, strung out in 15+ posts of 140 characters each, clogs up my Twitter feed and is annoying to read. Go write a blog post or publish on medium.com or lithub like everybody else.

If you set up bots to repeat the same message several times over a 24-hour period, it whispers "spam" to me and everyone who follows you. If you do it for more than a 24-hour period, that whisper turns to a shout.

If you (or your bots, and you know who you are), post just a link to Facebook on your Twitter feed, I'm not going there. Why?

• First of all, the angry timekeeper guardians that protect me from my own baser timewasting instincts (like Freedom and Strict Pomodoro on Chrome) won't let me go to Facebook, for my own good.
• Second, FB is a closed system, and I object to having to log in to get a piece of information. Mark Zuckerberg already has enough information about my opinions, habits, and friends and family, thank you very much. 
• Third, 99.9% of the time it's a piece of self-promotion, which, though not bad in itself, isn't worth the extra clicks and logins. 

Somewhere, if you're tweeting about a conference or event, someone involved ought to give its full name so we mere mortals can tell what you're talking about. Sometimes even clicking on the hashtag doesn't shed any light on the subject. 

Forgot to add this: if you want to play pranks with the the sensibilities of people who follow you, be prepared to be unfollowed and to never have anything you say taken seriously again, even though The Chronicle (a more forgiving medium) publishes your stuff. This is one scholar's body of work I never have to read. What credibility would that scholarship have? How would I know he's not making it up, too, a la the Sokal Social Text hoax?

Edited again, because apparently I still am angry about these oh-so-clever bros (see link above) messing with our minds on Twitter and thinking how meta they are for planting lies and making us fall for it: you call it a pomo experiment, but the erosion of trust is real.

Any tips that I missed?

The Five Commandments of Writing: A Response to the 10 Commandments of Twitter

At the Chronicle, Katrina Gulliver has written the "10 Commandments of Twitter" for those who want to break into this medium. Most of the actual commandments are pretty basic: ask questions, engage in conversation, don't just post news articles, and, implicitly, don't just use Twitter for self-promotion, although some well-known people do exactly that. She also recommends that you "show your personality" since it "impresses students."

Here is the key point I'd like to address: "Twitter can be something you have on in the background while you work."

That all depends on how you define work.  I can stuff envelopes and look at Twitter.  I can alphabetize student papers and look at Twitter.  I can grade and look at Twitter or organize my bookshelves and look at Twitter. I could certainly write a blogpost and still look at Twitter.

But write and look at those Twitter pop-ups every 10 seconds? Not so much. I'm ready to throttle the little TweetDeck bird after about 5 minutes.

I look at the advice from real writers on the sidebar, on the web, from a lot of my previous posts quoting writing experts, and from Boice and Silvia, and they all have just about the same Five Commandments:

1. Thou shalt leave the internet off or at least minimize distractions while you write.  
2. Thy writing should be thy sole focus for a period of time.  "Multitasking" is a myth if you're actually writing something worthwhile that requires thought. 
3. Thou shalt give thyself an extended period of time, if possible, so that thoughts can develop.
4. Thou shalt not interrupt the "flow" of writing that occurs once you get absorbed in your subject for the day, especially not for extraneous stuff like worrying about whether you turned in a report or whether X likes what you did that day. 
5. Thou shalt write every day, in the morning, if possible, or whenever works best for you. As Francis Ford Coppola puts it in his comments on writing, get up and write before anyone has a chance to be mean to you, to which I'd add "including you being mean to you," by giving space to that incessant internal monologue of tasks and worries. 

The thing is, as Gulliver correctly states, you can't just be on Twitter a little bit. The reason that's a problem is that it, like Facebook, has become such a primary means of scholarly communication for a lot of groups and scholars. Ignore these two, and you miss out on important information because that's where the information is being disseminated.  

So here is the quandary: 

• To write and eventually be part of the scholarly conversation, you need fewer distractions and as much time as you can manage to actually do the writing. You need to slow down, minimize interruptions, think, and pay attention to what's in your head.
• But to be part of the scholarly conversation, you have to pay attention to Twitter and Facebook on a daily (or, for Twitter, several times daily) basis, since there are resources there that you won't find elsewhere. You need to speed up, be ready to be interrupted, follow links when they occur (and everyone has a link to share), and give your attention to social networking. 

Someone needs to reconcile the 10 commandments with the 5 commandments. 

"Twitter can do it all"

A conversation I've been having with increasing frequency lately goes like this (redacted for content essence):

Enthusiast: "Twitter can do it all. Links to scholarship, trends in the field--it's all there. You should try Twitter."

Me: "I'm on Twitter, and I follow a fair number of people. It has some useful resources."

Enthusiast: "You really should try Twitter. It's great for keeping up with scholarship."

Me, with a little more heat: "I'M ON TWITTER. It has some useful resources, but it doesn't have everything."

Enthusiast: "Twitter has everything. It's wonderful because people tweet great insights into literature. You really should try it."

Me, giving up: "Thank you for the tech tip on this marvelous resource. Gee, I had never heard of it before."

Enthusiast: "Twitter can do it all! You should try Twitter!"

I'll spare you the rest. Let's just say the communication loop is not reaching from my mouth to Enthusiast's ear. I've talked before about how annoying it is when people assume that because you have a nuanced view of what a particular technology can and can't do, you just don't get it, so let me stop there.

Here is what I've heard in these conversations and more formal settings. Twitter is the following:

1. a great branding and self-promotion mechanism for scholars and grad students
2. a means of keeping up with the scholarship so you don't have to read those pesky journal articles
3. a source of great insights by great thinkers in the field before the insights are published
4. a way to get the gist of various speeches and sessions at conferences
5. a way to find links to resources that you'd otherwise never see.

I find #5 the most useful and sometimes #4, but "great insights"? My reaction to a lot of tweets is "well, sure," or "of course" or "that's interesting. I'll check out the link." Maybe I'm not following enough people, but I've never seen a tweet that made me feel as though Moses had come down from the mountain top with tiny, 144-character tablets.

Edited to add: in the comments, Dr. Koshary hilariously captured this "join my church" attitude:

"My Twitter is a mighty Twitter. Twitter is so great, you really should come to know Twitter. If loving Twitter is wrong, then I don't want to be right! Twitter can do anything, but Twitter lets us accidentally send sexually explicit messages meant for significant others to our parents because Twitter loves us enough to let us make our own mistakes."

MLA 2011 and the Great Twitter Debate

First, go read the great post and comments over at Roxie's World about the role of Twittering at the recent MLA. Go ahead; take your time. You'll be glad you did.

It seems to me that Twitter does three things really well.

1. In normal times (i.e., not during a convention) it points you to other media and allows the Twitterer to promote him or herself in a gentle way: "Go read my blog post! My article! This link!"
   
2. In normal times, it conveys external news along with approval/disapproval/excitement about something that's currently happening: "Go read this article! Can you believe that a politician said this?"
   
3. In conference times, it's a way of collectively live-blogging a session that conveys some of the excitement and ideas of the session.
   

The debate over Twitter is about the last one of these. There's too much to condense, but here are some of the questions raised, with apologies in advance for overstating some complex issues:

1. Did the preponderance of tweets from digital humanities sessions create a sense that those were more exciting sessions that the ones that didn't get covered?
2. Did the fact that the tweeted sessions seemed to dominate the news coverage skew the sense of what was happening elsewhere at the convention?
3. Are some sessions just more tweetable than others, or do people at the untweeted sessions need to get with the program and (there are hints of this among the comments) be less stodgy?
   
4. Alternately, you know those bumper stickers that say "Hang up and drive"? There are some comments that suggest that tweeters put the computer away and just listen.
5. Finally (and this is a contentious one), does the tweeted/nontweeted session divide create another category of insiders and outsiders?
   

As someone who was there, went to sessions, and read the Twitter stream, I'm of several minds about this. On one hand, it was exciting to see commentary going on in real time, although I wondered in some of those sessions whether the presenters were disturbed by seeing people staring at laptop screens instead of at the front of the room--and whether others in the row were disturbed by the clack of keys. (Probably not.) It was also exciting to see accounts of presentations I didn't get to see because of commitments elsewhere.

On the other hand, in some sessions, the papers were so amazing and complex (yet eminently listenable) that I could barely take adequate notes on them; a tweet couldn't possibly have done them justice. This is not to say that papers that can be tweeted are too simple; I'm just agreeing with Roxie's typist's point:"Still, I admit to thinking that some of what is untweeted is really untweetable -- Certain kinds of presentations, certain modes of argument simply don't lend themselves to that kind of quick and dirty distillation, and I don't think that's bad." Sometimes, you're just sitting there in an intellectually stimulating stream of good ideas, and you just have to let your mind go with them.

So: Twitter at MLA-- yea or nay? It depends. It was great for what it did, but I don't think we can ignore the reservations that Roxie's World has specified, and I don't think the answer is necessarily "more Twitter for all!" To pull out one of my hoary old blog mantras, one technology or medium isn't going to work for everything, and expecting it to be useful in all situations (like those of the complex listen-only papers) is to strain it beyond what it can usefully do.

And anyway, you know that someone will sooner or later tweet a message to announce where the full version of those listen-only papers has been published. That's the power of Twitter.