Although the Digital Humanities Symposium hosted by GW this
past weekend was about multiple aspects of the field—innovative applications
like the gorgeous Tempest app, open source online projects like the Map of Early Modern London, as well as pedagogical endeavors like the Global Shakespeares project—I
personally spent much of my time thinking about the role of social media, and
specifically Twitter, in academia. As I’ve said a few times now, my recent
acquisition of a tablet meant that this was the first time I’ve ever really
been able to engage in the digital aspects of a conference. Throughout the two
days I had Twitter open pretty much all of the time, and I was surprised by the
complexity of my feelings about it. In his talk, nicely timed at the end of the
first day of the conference (and readable here), Jeffrey Cohen made a strong
case for “a nonhierarchical and wall breaching nomadism assisted by social
media’s tools.” Although the bulk of his presentation was about his experience
as a blogger at In the Middle, Jeffrey’s also projected a livestream of the
#gwdh13 Twitter feed during his talk, highlighting the importance of this other
form of digital conversation.
I certainly found myself experiencing a small version of
this “wall breaching” at the conference. I am terribly shy, and the kind of
small talky, in-person networking that happens at conferences (indeed, the very
term “networking” itself) is the stuff of my nightmares. It was extremely
gratifying, then, to find myself in conversations through Twitter that I would
never have had the courage to initiate otherwise. Turns out, Twitter was also a
lot of fun (!), a creative outlet and a way to pass an hour stuck at the
registration table. Furthermore, Twitter helped me as a listener. I am an
extremely visual learner, and I have a hard time at conferences where listening
comprehension is the primary required skill. Twitter thus served unexpectedly
as a kind of evolving handout, helping me to keep up with key points.
I also have some real reservations about Twitter. Some of
its downsides have been nicely documented by others—for instance, see Ryan
Cordell’s invaluable post on the ethics of Tweeting at conferences—but I think
it’s worth raising a few more concerns. I’m uncomfortable, for instance, with
the way Twitter encourages us to discuss a presentation as it unfolds. What do
we lose, I wonder, when we articulate and—crucially—publish reactions to a presentation before it has finished? It
reminds me of my worst weeks in seminar, when I haven’t managed to finish the
reading and am trying to articulate something useful based on whatever I’ve
managed to get through. This is probably really old-fashioned of me, but I also
wonder: don’t we owe the speaker our undivided attention, or at least the
simulacrum of our undivided attention? What is it like to speak to an audience
that is scrambling, sometimes competitively, to share and analyze your every
sentence? I also worry that the stakes of social media may be somewhat
different for fledgling academics in ways that perhaps we haven’t totally
thought through. Every time I tweet or post a comment on a blog I think, “Well,
there goes my career.” Unfortunately, I think the same thing when I’m not
tweeting or commenting enough, and that brings me to my final concern: to what
extent is social media becoming mandatory,
just another hoop to be jumped through for anyone who wants to have a shred of a
chance at finding a job? Do we want that, especially when social media requires
a certain degree of access to devices—like my own iPad mini—with serious
environmental and human rights concerns attached to them? I bring up these
issues not as a condemnation of social media, which I largely find to be
everything Jeffrey says it can be, but as open questions.
Creative Commons photo from here
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