by Boyda Johnstone (@BoydaJosa), a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at Fordham University.
A few months ago,
medieval twitter blew up. In a
guest post on this blog, Dorothy Kim
called medievalists to tweet the MLA and argued persuasively that
“twitter, as a multimedia communication platform, functions like the
space of marginalia in medieval manuscripts.” And Jonathan Hsy
after #kzoo2014 posted a
Buzzfeed-style article outlining
the ways in which twitter is “not just a diversion or pastime for
conference attendees but can actually be a useful tool.” Both bloggers
built on the
official conference-tweeting guidelines established by
Roopika Risam before the 2014 MLA Convention. I’ve been on twitter for
quite a few years, and after having read these posts and followed
remotely on twitter some of the conversations at Kalamazoo, I was
excited at the prospect of engaging in the twitter conversation during
the
New Chaucer Society biennial conference in ReykjavÃk, Iceland, held between
July 16-20, 2014.
And my experience tweeting this
conference was so much better and more enriching than I’d even
anticipated. As a graduate student at a conference with many
well-respected scholars, twitter allowed me to find my voice, helped me
feel like I was part of the intellectual conversation. Discovering an
alternative digital discussion happening across tablet, smartphone, and
laptop; gaining new
perspectives through the reactions and analyses of others; finding
cross-currents and cross-connections with other panels in other rooms; gaining followers; meeting people in person who, amazingly, recognized
my name from Twitter; feeling more confident speaking to more senior
scholars in person due to our digital interactions.
On a
more personal and/or practical level, twitter kept me awake and alert
through multiple presentations, encouraged me to become a more active
and engaged listener, helped me hone my critical and analytical skills,
and helped me imprint ideas and arguments more firmly in my memory. I
loved that I could follow fragments of the conversation in other panels
as well, or catch up on panels I missed, which is important in such an
intensely scheduled conference. Together, we NCS tweeters created a
beautiful polyphony of fragmented, fascinated, confused, and curious
thoughts and ideas, a multiplicity of voice and response that is
crucial, I think, for ethical scholarship. Many of us are dedicated in
our teaching and in our work to encouraging and uncovering active
readerly engagement with texts, so this kind of polyphony has
pedagogical and academic ramifications as well.
However, twitter also has its limitations, and I noticed a few problems as I
observed the physical and virtual spaces around me. And so to the
question: who gets a voice on twitter? As Hsy noted, not
everyone has a twitter account, or possibly even the wireless
technology to follow along in a session. In actual fact, the
“multiplicity” of twitter voices was really only 15 or 20 people in a
conference of 500, and of those 15, only a handful were tweeting
regularly throughout the panels (though many more chimed in after the
conference). Not everyone who has a twitter account interacts with it in
the same way: some people need time to let arguments simmer and distil
before they can actively respond to them, and so they can’t necessarily
engage with sessions in real time; some people concentrate and learn
better when just sitting and listening rather than dividing their
attention among many different outlets; some people have political
and/or personal objections to publicizing themselves online in such a
way (for the NSA or future job committees to read). As much as we need
to be listening for twitter’s variegated vocalizations online, those
marginal responses to real-time scholarly activity, we also need to be
listening and looking for the various degrees of silences surrounding
the more vocal tweeters, and we should never fool ourselves into
thinking that the sounding voices are more important than the quiet.
More
to the point, we urgently need to maintain ‘Best Practices’ for twitter
that exercise awareness of issues of representation, privilege, access,
and attribution.
My panel at NCS was wonderful: my paper
felt good to
deliver, the three papers spoke to each other in interesting ways, and
we had a riveting discussion in the Q&A that left me wishing we had
more time to talk. In short, I really couldn’t have asked for a better
session. However, if you search the hashtags #ncs14 and #6d, you will
find...nothing.
According to twitter, this productive session on Chaucer’s
House of Fame—and its
shimmering, vanishing surfaces of ice and glass—didn’t even happen, an
ephemeral event that, if the future archive depended solely on the
Library of Congress’s official twitter catalog, will be completely
forgotten. While I fear this complaint may sound whiny or like a kind of
humble-brag, it is simply a fact that I am a graduate student being
trained in a struggling profession, and the future is uncertain. I would
ideally like to secure a permanent, nonprecarious job, and if we are
increasingly depending on twitter as an outlet for recognition and
remembrance, the twitter archive of conferences such as this one is
important to me.
On the other hand, if someone
had been
tweeting my paper and panel, there are a few guidelines I would have
wanted that person to follow; for the other harsh reality is, we young
scholars at a prestigious conference need to be careful not to allow our
ideas to slip out of our hands, to lose their attribution and find
homes somewhere else. One great thing about conference twitter etiquette
is that if one’s ideas are properly cited, they are henceforth archived
and remembered as
yours, not someone else’s. And at this
conference, I noticed that not everyone was observing
such best practices: ideas and individual
tweets were still floating around on twitter without attribution to
their progenitor, mostly due I think to oversights and
overexcitement (I even found myself doing this once or twice as well, admittedly). I think I speak for all graduate students and young
scholars present at this conference when I say that this loss of
attribution is a hugely pressing concern.
So, I’d like
to outline and reiterate, firstly, one thing that I think
needs to
happen on Twitter during conferences such as NCS, and secondly, six
things that
should happen to ensure ethical scholarly practices, for
students and faculty all. While Hsy, Kim, and Risam have already
outlined most of these guidelines, they bear repeating from the
perspective of an emerging young scholar. I welcome any further
additions, objections, or insights.
What needs to
happen: with a few understandable exceptions,
every single tweet must
contain named attribution to at least the last name of the presenter of
the idea (formats such as “[tweet proper] [#conference #session] [last
name pinned to the end]” are fine, though it is
best if the first tweet
contains a fuller statement of who is presenting, followed by briefer
attributions later). This means that if you choose to tweet a number of
the presenters’ (or questioners’) ideas in a row,
every single tweet
should contain the name of the idea’s progenitor. Imagine what would
happen if one unattributed tweet amongst many suddenly went viral:
suddenly it is the tweeter, not the presenter, who receives the credit.
Scholarly chaos ensues (....no, but really.). If you are adding your own
ideas to a presentation or tweeting a thought completely your own, make
that clear (eg. “Brown says
X, and I would add
Y” or “I wonder what
Brown would make of
Z”). This is no different than citing and grappling
with the ideas of others in our scholarly work, and should not be
difficult.
What should happen:
1.
Try not to
overtweet. Others have said that tweeting is like note-taking, but I
would complicate this notion a little bit; note-taking tends to be much
more profuse than the summative actions of tweeting should be. Be aware,
when tweeting, that the scholars whose ideas you are reproducing may
not be thrilled to have every single point they make in their
laboriously constructed paper haphazardly flung across the internet,
attribution or no (and they might not think or wish to announce this
preference at the beginning of their talk, as it might seem overly
defensive and set a bad tone). While I wish my paper had received an
enthusiastic tweet or two, I do not wish that the entire thing had been
published online in 140-character portions. Again, the currency of the
idea is volatile and unstable, and issues of consent and ownership are
at play here, especially for young scholars.
2.
Be
aware of other tweeters. When choosing to tweet in real-time, follow the
session and conference hashtags and observe what other people are
saying. Twitter is supposed to be a dialogue, not a monologue, and as
such you should listen to the multiplicity of voices around you;
remember Kenneth Burke’s famous claim that when entering into
conversation, you should “listen for a while, until you decide that you
have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar.” One of
the most exciting twitter experiences I had at this conference occurred
when I and co-tweeters in a different session, in a different room,
realized that we were having parallel discussions about manuscript
paleography/codicology that could speak to one another in productive
ways. This new awareness could trigger further conversations and
cross-pollination of ideas outside the panel sessions, and would not
have occurred if we weren’t looking and listening for the tweets of
others as well as our own.
3.
Be respectful of the
physical space you inhabit as you are tweeting online. Try to maintain a
courteous posture (ie. do not bend far over the table on your phone
lest you resemble a bored, texting undergraduate), try to make eye
contact with the speaker, take manual notes perhaps, try to convey a
sense that you are at least as much present in the room as you are
present online. Remember, again, that not everyone tweets, not everyone
has read the previously cited manifestos on conference tweeting, not
everyone is technologically savvy. I have heard stories of people in
sessions becoming offended at the tweeting postures of others,
perceiving them as rudeness; and although I don’t want to victim-blame,
being aware of your physical body as you tweet communicates respect to
the diversity of persons around you—including the speaker—and minimizes
misinterpretation of your twitter-stance as rudeness or boredom.
4.
Be aware of which panels are and aren’t being represented. The degree of panel
representation depends in large part upon who happens to be sitting in
the room and how prolific of a tweeter he/she is. If one panel or paper
is tweeted more than another, that panel or paper receives
disproportionate representation online. I don’t fully know how to remedy
this problem, but I wonder if, in the future, there should be an
official “Tweeter” stationed in every room (or perhaps a job for the
moderator) so that every panel and/or paper receives at least one or two
summative and/or representative tweets. Until that day, just look
around you and observe whose ideas are being tweeted and whose aren’t,
and consider actively seeking out an underrepresented panel to broadcast
it online.
5.
Be aware that tweets cannot encompass complex arguments. In one of the most well-attended sessions at NCS,
8A on the question of the “Agential Object” in critical theory, an audience member
(unfortunately and somewhat hypocritically I don’t know who it was!)
pointed out that one of the problems with new methodologies is that we
as scholars tend to want to translate them into functional machines that
allow us to pump out scholarship and articles as fast as possible.
Similarly, when tweeting, we must be aware of the dangers of
domesticating complex ideas into facile 140-character boxes. Judith Butler, in her
essay “Ordinary, Incredulous” in
The Humanities and Public Life (Fordham UP, 2014), argues that we need to be wary of
breaking down complex arguments into the language of instrumentality,
because that kind of simplification can cheapen and indeed betray our
very calling as critical humanities scholars. To avoid this problem,
treat tweets as imperfect containers of ideas that—as
panel 10D on “Monument, Edifice, Container,” organized by Elaine Treharne and Noelle
Phillips, taught us in regard to medieval manuscripts—possess fragments,
ruptures, limitations, even as they present exciting possibilities for
distilling ideas into graspable and memorable bits.
6.
Finally, with this last problem in mind,
be aware of the form of your
tweet. As this is the first time I have ever tweeted a conference or
panel, I don’t entirely feel like I have the authority to say this, but
in my opinion a good conference tweet contains both local and global (or
specific and general) components. Local so that there’s something
educative or some substance for your claim, but global so that outsiders
looking in—and those whose twitter-feed is currently being bombarded by
tweets from excitable Chaucerians—might derive some kind of general
application from our conferencing. Don’t fill your tweets—at least not
all of them—with esoteric facts and alienating coded details. Tweets
with general instead of or as well as specific content help avoid the
problem, mentioned above, of overexposing the intimate details of
someone else’s argument. And also, tweets with general instead of or as
well as specific content are arguably more fun and engaging to read.
This
last suggestion brings me to my final point, as the question of how we
present ourselves on twitter to the wider world is, again, about
privilege and voicing: we scholars at this exotic academic conference
(if I may include myself amongst this group), some of whom have letters
after our names and stable institutional positions, are always already
privileged by the very nature of
being here, and by nature of belonging
to institutions that in many cases still support such expensive events.
As much as we’d like to believe that it is the virtue of our scholarship
that has brought us to such a place, in actual fact there are powers
and institutions that have contributed to bringing us here, that have
given us a voice. Using twitter as a digital resource means that we are
not
only speaking to other people at the conference, but also to those
who could not make it, who were not accepted, who have been cast outside
the academic institution, who deride the academic institution, who have
no interest in the academic institution, or who have never been able to
get
into the academic institution for various personal, material,
political, geographic, or economic reasons. And as we are increasingly
called (rightly) to make our work legible to audiences outside the ivory
tower, and (less rightly, perhaps) to justify our work to such
institutes as funding organizations, we need to become more conversant
in how to package our ideas for the looking and listening nonacademics
around us who, well, may not fully understand this weird and wild field
of medieval literature. This stuff is going online, friends, and others
are listening: please be aware of who is getting a voice.
*I am grateful to Zachary Hines, University of Texas, for his valuable feedback on this entry.
