Pleased to Tweet You
Transcript
April 2011: As a graduate student and fledgling academic from the University of Texas, I attend my first College Conference on Composition and Communication in Atlanta. There, I lament my lack of either a smartphone or a tablet with which to join in the Twitter conversation—in spite of the fact that I am not yet on Twitter.
May 2012: iPad in hand, I attend my first Computers and Writing conference, begin exuberantly live-tweeting panels, and find my Brigadoon. Where once I felt profoundly awkward talking to strangers, I find myself conversing (in person and online) with a host of new friends and colleagues.
The following week, I attend the Rhetoric Society of America Conference, and although the Twitter community there is much smaller, it offers me a safe space in a sea of formal and intimidating academics. And via what is likely just a joke made on the Twitter backchannel, a meta-panel about tweeting begins to take shape for the Computers and Writing conference the following year.
My presentation on that panel performed what it described: drawing connections between participatory theater, conference presentations and Twitter by inviting the audience to tweet while displaying the live feed as my visual aid.
This article is the archival evolution of my presentation. It offers an argument about the experience of live-tweeting by re-creating that experience for the viewer. As you listen to me present my paper in the video on the right, you'll be asked to divide your attention between the video and its visual aides and the constantly updating facsimile of a live Twitter feed on the left.
The paper I gave at the conference and that I am reproducing in the following videos follows the formal structure of a five-act play in order to playfully draw attention to the connection between theater and academic conferences. For if we decide to look at conferences as a form of theater, then the call to live-tweet is a call for a participatory theater, a call for the emancipation of the spectator.
The body of this article offers an argument about liveness that, sadly, an archive can never hope to fully replicate. As Diana Taylor points out in her work, The Archive and the Repertoire, “The live performance can never be captured or transmitted through the archive. A video of a performance is not a performance, though it often comes to replace the performance as a thing in itself” (20).
"Pleased to Tweet You" makes an argument about liveness, about what happens when people come together to watch each other in a particular time and space, by creating a replica of that live performance experience. As you watch the following videos, I ask you to imagine that we are participating in a conference, attending a panel together, in a room in the same time and place. I'll be standing at the podium, giving my paper, while you make choices about where to direct your attention. Will you look at the Twitter feed or the speaker? Can you navigate both?
The Twitter feed in the middle of your screen will include “real” tweets quoted from fellow academics (and signaled by the green “retweet” icon), faux Twitter accounts with direct quotations from some of the theorists I’ll be drawing on (signaled by the “favorite” icon and cited in the credits), and some of my own tweets composed specifically to align with the arguments of this article, presented via accounts that I’ve invented for the occasion. After this Prologue, you won't be seeing me in the Twitter stream, since I'll be giving my paper.
But "Pleased to Tweet You" is an argument about participation, encouraging spectator involvement over passive absorption, so I want to hear from you as well! Below this video is a real live feed in which you can include your thoughts by tweeting with the hashtag #tweetmytalk. Your real-time tweets will then be collected in the Epilogue, and thus dialogue can continue between you, me, and other readers of this article.
Both in this re-enactment and in my original presentation, I chose to display the live feed while speaking—to highlight the participatory and theatrical nature of live-tweeting. As Howard Rheingold calls it, Twitter is “rolling present”—it moves in real time just like theater. And in theater, you get to make choices about where to focus your attention. So I want you to think of what you see on your screen as an invitation. By displaying the live feed while I talk to you, I’m inviting you to pay attention to both me and the conversation around us. I see this invitation as a gesture of both trust and respect. I’m encouraging you to divide your attention while I make the case for an ethics of participation.
Close [X]