Pleased to Climax
Transcript
“[S]crew your courage to the sticking place, and we’ll not fail” (Macbeth, Act I, scene VII)
What can I do but take a stand? Plant my flag on the side of tweeting and defend my position!
First, on the issue of rudeness. As I noted in Act I and will expand on in the following act, I argue that live-tweeting actually focuses attention even more closely on presenters’ ideas. It requires energy and attention that take us well beyond passive spectation. Live-tweeting is a more public form of taking notes.
As to the intellectual property objection, in the age of digital and social media, our utterances are no more safe or at risk than they ever were... Twitter just makes them more visible. Without getting too far into Derrida’s theories of language, the important point is that writing and speech depend on the exact same risks. Both must “remain readable despite the absolute disappearance of any receiver.” As a result, every word, sentence, or sign can be placed between quotation marks and torn from its original context.
Sharing our half-formed ideas at conferences is just as, if not more risky than trying to get them published. It's just, perhaps, fortunate for us that journals don't publish work they deem unfinished. To argue that someone violates privacy by using Twitter to broadcast ideas that are publicly presented strikes me as somewhat absurd.
That isn’t to say we shouldn’t respect each other, that there aren’t rules of engagement. If someone doesn’t want to be tweeted, we should respect their wishes. We should also be just as attentive to citation and attribution on Twitter as we would be in our written articles. And as to the sarcastic comments that sometimes sprout on the backchannel, I’d say those just make the tweeter look like a jerk. But none of this should dissuade us from live-tweeting. For if we aren’t here to interact with each other (in person and online), then why are we here?
Coming from a background in performance theory, it seems natural for me to think of academic conferences as a form of participatory theater. As spectators at a conference, we are asked to make choices. We have to choose whom we want to watch—and there's a risk in that—often an exciting risk, and sometimes a frustrating one. How often have you found yourself in a panel that turned out to be a far cry from what you expected? And due to the live-ness of the event, the temporality, and the social etiquette of remaining seated for the duration of a panel, we are typically stuck with our choices. And there's something exciting about that. It’s what makes conferences what they are.
But for audiences of the ideological and political events that conference papers are, live-tweeting is a means to actively engage with the material. To cheer it on. To push back. To participate.
In his book, The Emancipated Spectator, Jacques Ranciere argues that "To be a spectator is to be separated from both the capacity to know and the power to act.” To simply spectate a conference panel is to sit quietly and be told what to think. To a wary eye, this can seem dubiously similar to Paulo Freire’s “banking system” of education in which the teacher/speaker is the depositor of knowledge, the student/spectator a mere repository for content.
However, if we value the exchange of ideas, the freedom to learn from those we would teach, then, as Ranciere would have it, “What is required is a theatre without spectators, where those in attendance learn from as opposed to being seduced by images; where they become active participants as opposed to passive voyeurs.”
We are here, performing for and with each other, in a measured time and space. In this theater of ideas, live-tweeting offers a mode and platform for engagement that encourages us to think together, to interact, to form a community. It grants us agency in what can otherwise remain one-sided conversations. It helps us connect with each other over common ground and cultivate networks that last far beyond the three-day event.
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