Pleased to Falling Action
Transcript
"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so" (Hamlet, Act II, Scene II).
Reflecting on the objections to live-tweeting lead me to think about what Twitter and my live-tweeting practices do to and for me—how Twitter is undeniably a vehicle by which I compose myself as a digital scholar.
Among other things, live-tweeting makes me a reporter (quoting and summarizing other people's words), it makes me a cheerleader (favoriting, re-tweeting, and expressing enthusiasm), and it makes me a participant in an experience that stretches beyond just my own panel.
Importantly, live-tweeting also makes me powerful. In live-tweeting conferences, events as they occur, I am made into an archivist, recording in real-time the happenstances that happen in front of me. I create a record of the event. Sometimes the record.
Twitter, therefore, makes me responsible—for the ways I represent and interpret the words of others. It makes me a vehicle of hearsay that others might cite and proliferate. It therefore calls for an ethics of participation, and I hope that this presentation will get us thinking and talking about why we tweet.
Live-tweeting at a conference is an ideological decision about attention, access, and "knowing" - and I'm not here to tell you the answers. I'm here because I want to talk to you. I am at this conference, both in person and on Twitter, because I want to ask you what you think. Do you tweet to report? To comment? To record? Who are you tweeting for? And if you aren’t tweeting, why not?
I’m here because I want to be heard, sure, but more than that I want to incite responses. My fifteen minutes of fame will not be devoted to a hierarchy of knowledge. I am not the expert on Twitter or live-tweeting or the politics of academia. I know a lot about performance theory, baking, and humor. But I aspire to the humility of constant learning. Here, I hope to call forth responses and engagement from those of you that are both seasoned and novice, that I may learn something new. I hope to bring people together into a sense of community around a particular idea at a particular moment in time. That's what theater does. It tells stories in a given space for a given period of time. Here we share our ideas without the cloak of narrative. And perhaps that rawness is what makes us more sensitive. We don't dress things up with dialogue or plot, and without a whole production crew to back us up, we must stand alone behind our ideas.
But we cannot let the fear of being mistaken, misquoted, or misunderstood keep us from taking the chance that something new and unexpected might emerge. There is no escaping those risks. Twitter or no Twitter, they are always there, built into the very structure of language.
I see the practice of live-tweeting, and of presenting at conferences, as the journey of Ranciere’s ignorant student. As he argues, "The distance the [student] has to cover is not the gulf between her ignorance and the schoolmaster's knowledge. It is simply the path from what she already knows to what she does not yet know, but which she can learn just as she has learnt the rest; which she can learn not in order to occupy the position of the scholar, but so as better to practice the art of translating, of putting her experience into words and her words to the test; of translating her intellectual adventures for others and counter-translating the translations of their own adventures which they present to her."
What is live-tweeting if not the act and test of translation? Whether we tweet to report, to comment, or to record, we must translate and condense our experiences into 140 characters or less and test them against the responses of our peers.
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