Excerpt from “My Norm Is More Normal Than Yours: Academic Tweeting and Loose Fish,” which in its last line nails the problem of social media and academia. Read the full blog by Aaron Brady in The New Inquiry, in which he grapples with the reasons behind the conference live-tweeting kerfuffle.
The thing we’re unsure about, I think, is whether academia has a responsibility to be public. Of course, talking about “academia” (and using a “we” as if it’s a single monolithic entity) is yet another way of gliding soundlessly over the fractures and contractions that a thing like “twittergate” reveals. But when an event like this reveals that many of us have been operating from different definitions of the word “publish” and different understandings of who it is that we take to be our publics, it demonstrates a crisis in our understanding of the public sphere. The public is something many of us gesture towards, but perhaps it’s as available as it is to be gestured towards precisely because none of us know very specifically what we mean by it. “Public” is not something we can take for granted, especially when academic publishing essentially means putting information where the non-academic “public” can’t get it.
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