7/19/2022
Twitter is Just Fine
Rounduptags: social media, History Twitter
John Warner is the author of Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities and The Writer's Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing.
I will admit upfront that my perspective on so-called “Academic Twitter” is shaped by the fact that without Twitter – in conjunction with this blog – I would not have a “career” (if that’s what this is) that has any relationship to academia (whatever that is).
We have been talking about academics and Twitter and Academic Twitter because of a recent opinion article at the Chronicle, in which a trio of scholars (Katherine C. Epstein, Irina Dumitrescu, and Rafael Walker) weighed in on the question, “Is Twitter making academe stupid and mean?”
Of the three short pieces, Professor Epstein’s has gotten the most play on Twitter likely because it is the most critical of Twitter and academics who tweet.
Let me start with a general agreement that Twitter, as structured around “engagement” does indeed reward the kind of behavior and discourse that is counterproductive in academic spaces. It can and does bring out the worst in people, and the examples of people (very much including academics) behaving badly are manifest and numerous.
But there are a number of other claims that are not so much wrong in the objective sense, but are so shaped by a world view steeped in a narrow and perhaps over-rosy vew of academia, that they very much fail to capture the dynamics of Academic Twitter.
Prof. Epstein’s broad argument is stated admirably clearly, “Twitter represents the denial of the values that academe is supposed to represent.”
Those values are:
- Critical thinking
- The importance of expertise
- Scholarly rigor and discipline
I am fan of those values, so it looks like Prof. Epstein and I can find some common ground, but I think she stumbles out of the gate with her criticism of Twitter as a poor vehicle for critical thinking.
comments powered by Disqus
News
- The Debt Ceiling Law is now a Tool of Partisan Political Power; Abolish It
- Amitai Etzioni, Theorist of Communitarianism, Dies at 94
- Kagan, Sotomayor Join SCOTUS Cons in Sticking it to Unions
- New Evidence: Rehnquist Pretty Much OK with Plessy v. Ferguson
- Ohio Unions Link Academic Freedom and the Freedom to Strike
- First Round of Obama Administration Oral Histories Focus on Political Fault Lines and Policy Tradeoffs
- The Tulsa Race Massacre was an Attack on Black People; Rebuilding Policies were an Attack on Black Wealth
- British Universities are Researching Ties to Slavery. Conservative Alumni Say "Enough"
- Martha Hodes Reconstructs Her Memory of a 1970 Hijacking
- Jeremi Suri: Texas Higher Ed Conflict "Doesn't Have to Be This Way"
Trending Now
- New transcript of Ayn Rand at West Point in 1974 shows she claimed “savage" Indians had no right to live here just because they were born here
- The Mexican War Suggests Ukraine May End Up Conceding Crimea. World War I Suggests the Price May Be Tragic if it Doesn't
- The Vietnam War Crimes You Never Heard Of