Pleased to Epilogue
Transcript
In a May 2014 article on "Twitter Literacy," Howard Rheingold explains that "Twitter is one of a growing breed of part-technological, part-social communication media that require some skills to use productively. Sure, Twitter is banal and trivial, full of self-promotion and outright spam. So is the Internet. The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it—on knowing how to look at it."
I hope this article has offered some insight into a way of looking at Twitter and its value as a community-building tool for academics. Obviously, there's more to be said on the issue, and I hope you'll join the conversation.
Because this is an argument explicitly about Twitter's use-value, though, the article design confines the public feedback to that venue. Any tweets tagged with the hashtag #tweetmytalk will be collected on this Epilogue page and become part of the archive. Twitter's 140 character constraint can prove challenging, but hopefully it's a challenge you'll be interested in taking up —especially if I've convinced you to hop on the Twitter train for the first time. And there are always work-arounds, such as tweeting a link to a longer blog post response.
But I'm excited to hear what other people have to say: theoretical approaches I hadn't considered, or additional resources you can contribute. For example, my article talks a lot about the etiquette of tweeting from an audience perspective, but Collin Brooke has an excellent blog post considering how Twitter might or should affect our composition process for conference papers. I included a link to that post in a Prologue tweet and have tweeted it again here. If you know of other such materials, please share! In addition to being a dialogue platform, this page could become a collaborative bibliographic resource. That would be marvelous.
If you have questions or comments you don't want to declare so publicly, though, feel free to email or tweet me directly. And if we run into each other at a conference one of these days, I'll certainly be pleased to tweet you.
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