A Memorable Fancy » twitter

Oh, the Humanities!

erik — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 17:52:55 +0000

Everyone is talking about Brian Croxall’s provocative MLA paper right now, so I might as well jump on the bandwagon. Go read the paper, if you haven’t already, but here’s a quick summary: Brian couldn’t go to MLA because he had no job interviews there and couldn’t afford the cost of attending, so he had his panel chair read it for him and he posted it on his blog at the time the paper was being read. The paper itself is about the difficulties, financial and otherwise, of being a part-time instructor. He includes some stunning statistics, and the catchy parenthetical statement: “And yes, that means I do qualify for food stamps while working a full-time job as a professor!”

Both the content and the mode of communication are interesting to us here. First, the content. It is no secret that universities are relying more and more on contingent faculty (alternately called part-time or adjunct), and that many of these faculty hold advanced degrees, often a Ph.D. It also comes as no surprise that many new Ph.D. candidates have trouble finding tenure-track jobs, although the numbers are stunning (Croxall claims that many rejection letters mention 400+ applicants). Discuss the relationship between these phenomena in the comments if you wish.While not surprising, it is quite depressing for humanities scholars, for whom the holy grail of jobs is usually the coveted tenure-track position at a research university. Many of us simply don’t know what else to do, and have spent so many precious years crafting a dissertation and teaching for peanuts that we have either forgotten how to do anything else or neglected to learn anything else. Or it could be that we just don’t want to give up the dream. Check out Bitch, Ph.D.’s blog entry, especially the comments, for a robust discussion about this.

If Croxall had simply read the paper as scheduled, I suspect he would have had a sympathetic audience and interesting discussion among the dozens of scholars attending, and then it would have been forgotten. Maybe someone would’ve tweeted or blogged about it, but I doubt the Chronicle of Higher Ed would have picked it up. Let’s recap. I did not attend MLA, but I follow @briancroxall (as well as reading his blog and perusing Prof Hacker as often as possible), who tweeted about the paper the morning of. I read it and retweeted it, as did many others. Those of us following #MLA09 on twitter noticed the shitstorm, which led to more readership , and are now blogging about it, which will likely lead to more (check out his tweet about spike in visitors after the Chronicle article). Instead of being quickly forgotten, this paper ends up being potentially the most-talked about aspect of MLA this year, and propels Brian Croxall into an academic-blogger-media celebrity, for whatever that’s worth.

The social media-twitter-blogosphere has moved the discussion quickly to a more public discussion. These two components — speed and breadth — are what have long been missing in the academy, and comprise some of the most exciting aspects of using new media in conjunction with old-fashioned face-to-face conferencing. In terms of longevity of the discussion, that is yet to be seen.

I hope that the mode of communication does not overshadow the message. Academics in digital humanities are finding innovative ways of communicating and understanding communication, and are working to revolutionize the ways in which we read, discuss, archive, and view texts, however we may define that ever-changing term. But the context in which we do that seems to be shrinking. Whether digital or not, humanities scholars are facing a glut of Ph.D. production and a scarcity of academic jobs. Like it or not, those of us with higher degrees are going to have to find new ways to work, and new venues in which to do this work. The problem is systemic, and many solutions have been proposed (e.g. unionization of contingent faculty and decrease in Ph.D. production), but for those of us at, near, or just beyond the finish line, the academic future looks more grim than ever before.

I am approaching that finish line, and I have come to realize that my Plan A (t-t job) is unrealistic. It is still Plan A, but I need to find a realistic Plan B (and C and D). Like many, I came to grad school because I love to write, and I am passionate about teaching. Earning a living doing both will be difficult. I realized this at at time when I felt I was too close to quit. I have seen other graduate students quit the program, and many of them are quite happy in their new jobs. That said, I will be on the market next year. I will send out applications. I will (probably) go to MLA. In the meantime? I will continue to work as a part-time instructor. I will continue to do freelance tutoring. I will blog. I will tweet. I will keep my eyes open for opportunities to use my diverse skillset. I will keep you updated.

Happy New Year.

Twitter Backchannels

erik — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 02:22:15 +0000

The phenomenon of backchannels has fascinated me lately. It started at danah boyd’s talk at U of M (.mov version) back in October, where a twitter hashtag (#danahjsb) was announced early on. Although I didn’t know anybody there, I ended up in a conversation with others in the room while the talk was going on, and I learned as much from the backchatter as from the talk.

If you are not at the conference or event in question, you can use backchannels to eavesdrop. Take, for example the Internet as Playground and Factory conference (#ifp09), which had some heavy-hitters attending. Monitoring the backchannel discussions allows non-participants to interact with those present, and to keep abreast of the various topics being discussed.

The concept is not new. Students IM or text each other in class. Other social situations often call for subrosa communication. The most interesting difference is that the use of public social networking tools like twitter make the process public, and allow people to interact with strangers, or with people whose phone numbers or other info you don’t have.

A couple caveats. First, I wonder about the split in attention required for such discussion. If I am engaged in a backchannel discussion while listening to a speaker, can I really fully attend to what the speaker is saying? How much can I really do at one time? The second caveat is specifically twitter-related: the twitter search doesn’t seem to stay current for very long, so backchannels don’t persist as archives, but are useful really only during or just after an event.

While I am concentrating mainly on academic conferences, I imagine backchannels would be a good way to organize and communicate in other arenas, such as political events. Does anybody have any examples of backchannel communication in other areas?

Twitter practices

erik — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 17:09:58 +0000

Since I’ve been talking about twitter lately, I thought I’d share some thoughts about how I’ve been using it, and how this differs from some of my other social networking practices.

When I first started doing social networking regularly (was it Friendster? Tribe? Let’s say Myspace), I was very particular about whom I friended. I would only accept requests from people I knew well at first, which restricted my networking essentially to friends. After a while (and coincident perhaps with my move to Facebook), I began more liberally adding friends. I add people I’ve met once, say, at the bar, or old classmates to whom I haven’t spoken in 20 years, if ever. I have some students in my friends list. It’s a much looser list, but still people I have personally met.

On twitter my practice is altogether different. I add strangers who look interesting, friends of friends, people whose blogs I follow, people with similar interests, bands, institutions. Why? I’m not sure, to be honest, but I can take a few guesses. First, although I use it to chronicle my life constantly, twitter seems less personal. No pics, no lists of interests, no external apps, just text mostly, which for some reason seems less instrusive. Maybe it’s the 140 character limit – I don’t feel I have to get bogged down in a long treatise, on, say, twitter practices, when I read a tweet.

Also, I think there’s something to the asymmetrcality of the system. On FB and MS, you have to friend people or not – it ‘s a choice that is forced on you. If you want to see someone’s stuff, they have to see yours (privacy settings aside). If someone wants to be your “friend,” you have to be theirs. On twitter people can feel free to follow me and I have no pressure to do the same (although I often do) and I can follow peeople without them feeling like I, I don’t know, want something from them.

Jane (@janefader) once tweeted “For me, using twitter is like sneaking off to facebook’s VIP lounge” andI think there’s something to that, a certain type of specifity and granularity, perhaps. At any rate, little of this is built into the twitter system, and most of this is my idiosyncratic take on using social networking sites. How does your social network usage change across systems?

Twitter links

erik — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 19:23:34 +0000

While poor Kim is making the unnecessarily painful decision about whether to join twitter, I just clicked on three links from my twitter friends, two of which are about twitter, and all of which I will share with you.

From Steven Johnson (@stevenbjohnson), a NYTimes article about the Kindle for iPhone, in which Steve Jobs is quoted as saying that “people don’t read anymore.”
From Kris Colvin (@KrisColvin), a retweet from @msaleem: A link about twitter search that talks about why the twitter people refused a huge sum of money from Facebook.
From Chuck Tryon (@chutry), a link to his own article “Why you should be on twitter” where he deftly debunks some of the myths and criticisms surrounding the service, many of which “fall into some of the worst habits of technological determinism”.

Quick note/question: what is the netiquette for linking to tweeps on a blog? I chose here to link to twitter profiles and not blogs or other sites, but I included full names. Appropriate? What do you twitterers think?

Why you should use Twitter

erik — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:25:19 +0000

With permission, I have copied Doug’s entire post about twitter, and why he thinks his friends and colleagues should use it. It is the perfect app for a particular type of messaging: real-time, short, broadcast. I like doug’s description: “a status message on steroids.”

A service you should use: Twitter

The background:

I have been using a service called Twitter for a while; looking to see if it is worthwhile. After several months I have concluded that it is a really cool way for people in my station in life to keep up with one another.

The product:

Twitter is a “micro-blogging” tool. Basically, it is like a status message on steroids. You can either IM to it, SMS to it, or log on to your account online and post what you are doing, how you feel or whatever else. Everyone that subscribes to you (add you as a friend) will get an update according to how they set up their account (either by IM, SMS, or whatever.). So, for instance you need help moving a friend and you have 20 friends on twitter–you send out a message to everyone and say “I need help this saturday from 9 to 11am moving a friend, please call me at XXX-XXXX for details” or “We are going to the Royal Kubo for Karaoke tonight at 6pm, all are welcome.” Everyone knows and anyone that wants to show up does so with minimal effort.

The Pitch:

I would like you to sign up for it at www.twitter.com and add me as your “friend.” THen we can be better friends and God will like you more. By the way, if you blog you can get one of the widgets on your blog, like I have (the grey box) pretty easily. So, please sign up right now. Now. Seriously.