Pleased to Conflict
Transcript
"Now is the winter of our discontent" (Richard III, Act I, Scene I).
In fall of 2012, an academic hurly burly erupted on Twitter about the ethics of live tweeting. Eventually dubbed “Twittergate” by its participants, the conversation raised concerns about live-tweeting, and escalated to the point of name-calling and subsequently deleted tweets. The initial moderator of the conversation, Tressie McMillan Cottom, later wrote a blog post reflecting on the issues raised. In it, Cottom condenses the primary threads of the conversation to four major concerns:
First, the etiquette of tweeting during a presentation. People argue that tweeting is a sign of inattention and therefore a mark of rudeness. One opponent asserts that “it is uniformly inappropriate for a participant to tweet during a session & only situationally app[ropriate] for [the] audience.”
The second major thread deals with anxieties about intellectual property and the co-optation of ideas. Critics expressed concern that the failure to attribute quotes (sometimes a difficult task given the 140 character constraint) can lead to idea theft and misrepresentation.
Third, the issue of digital branding and the selfish potential of capitalizing on the ideas of others. Some detractors level the accusation that live-tweeting is a self-serving behavior done to generate a hip, digital-scholar brand.
And finally, people discussed the issue of “bad behavior” on the backchannel—when tweeting about presenters turns snarky and sarcastic, when it shifts away from a discussion with the presenter to a conversation about them.
The “Twittergate” tweets then prompted an inflammatory Chronicle of Higher Education post titled “The Academic Twitterazzi,” in which opponents of live tweeting expressed their views that the practice is “distracting to some presenters,” “a form of neolibralism,” and a byproduct of “an intellectually lazy society.” Strong words.
And although the defenders of live-tweeting offered myriad rebuttals to many of these objections and as I will do throughout this presentation, the surprising vehemence of the antagonism found in the “Twittergate” conversation does at least give pause to this budding academic with a fondness for conference tweeting. In my bright eyed and bushy-tailed enthusiasm, I’ll admit that many of these concerns never even occurred to me in my first forays into live tweeting.
I’ve largely seen my live-tweeting as a joyous, positive thing—publicly cheering on my peers and enthusiastically circulating ideas. But reading through the litany of complaints, I can see the fairness in some of them. I often spend more time in panels looking at my screen than making eye contact with presenters. Without attention to my full Twitter stream and the context of some tweets, someone could likely mistake a quote for my own idea. And although I tend to avoid sarcastic tweeting on the backchannel, I’ve absolutely used live-tweeting as a means to an end. As a result of tweeting at conferences, I’ve broadened my academic network exponentially and been invited to speak on several conference panels. I even won a social media fellowship for the RSA conference in San Antonio and was essentially being paid to tweet. In attempting to promote the work of my fellows (and thereby promoting myself), I have reaped rewards that some might label mercenary. So what is an honest young tweeter to do?
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