Still hoping to find you engaging the comments here. Your tweet today linking to that dismal (and largely accurate) piece on academic publishing has many connections to what’s been said here, in your post and in the comments. For me, the questions have more to do with attitudes toward professionalization (the “academy” that’s really a largely self-certifying business, not that that’s always bad) and ideas of learning, education, and knowledge construction than they do with the ironic contrasts between academic book markets and more general-readership markets. The two are connected, of course, but it’s really the underlying attitudes and assumptions I’m interested in thinking about at this point. And that brings me back to this post, and this comment stream, and the question of civility within a context of humility and honesty and real curiosity (not just scanning for info relevant to one’s own career path).

Twitter isn’t really a “proper” space. Twitter is instead an *open* space, where ‘open’ is intended along several vectors. For one thing, it’s open because anyone can read your tweets. By extension, one can track certain keywords as they’re mentioned on Twitter, as I’m sure the ProfHacker folks follow words like ‘ProfHacker’. As a result, you can know at an instant when someone’s talking about you. This first type of openness makes possible a second type: a kind of attribution and cross-referecing culture that makes academics drool. Mechanisms like retweets and @-mentions allow the writer to alert others when they’re being referenced. Taken together, you have a space where everyone can hear everything, and there are decent filters for finding the stuff that interests you.

The problem of Twitter that Jim is alluding to is less that it’s becoming professionalized than that the radical openness and hyper-audibility of Twitter makes traditional distinctions between personal and professional networks far more porous. What’s uncomfortable about this is that we don’t have the social tools, mores, conventions to deal with the merged network. We have ingrained and long-standing (though largely unspoken) rules about what can be said over a beer after a conference, and the extent to which it’s permissible to loop that conversation back into a more public one. But when Jim challenges PH’s move to the Chronicle (just to stick with the example) in the unified space of Twitter, and George bristles, it’s hard to know which set of rules to fall back on: the over-a-beer rules that say to push the envelope because we’re friends, the conference panel rules that say not to push a question too hard when it’s obvious that it’s a personal sore spot for someone, or whatever.

I’m skeptical that moving the conversation to personal blogs is going to solve the problem, as Jim suggests. Just because you own the infrastructure of your personal space (to whatever extent you actually do, but that’s another matter) doesn’t change the fact that the kind of openness I describe above – where public really means public, and everyone can hear everything – is coming. Because Twitter is a single service (and can maintain its own internal search, etc), it’s emerging there first. But when people can monitor the whole web like they monitor keywords in a TweetDeck column, the Bava will be functionally like a Twitter account in terms of its openness. The need for social conventions doesn’t go away just because it’s “your space”.

So, Jim — yes, Twitter has become far more professional than it used to be, and what I post to Twitter has therefore changed a lot, and I mourn that a bit. Basically I keep all my complaining to offline fora, though I try to limit even that, on the principle that everyone’s just doing their best and I need to practice compassion and understanding.

But the thing is that Twitter created a professional network for me that I never had before, so I forgive it its professionalizing tendency. Twitter is more proper and professional than it used to be, yes, but conferences are *less* proper and professional than they used to be because of Twitter. And I think that’s good. It’s absolutely a note-passing technology, and the brave among us do use it to criticize that needs criticizin’.

I need to think hard and long about what you’ve been saying about excessive propriety and disciplinary self-congratulation, though, Jim. I’m particularly prone to both.

At the same time something Bethany suggests in this post kind of scares me about how we see this different forms of media more generally—rather than Twitter specifically—and that is the professional nature of these publishing tools. How they are increasingly becoming a way to frame our professional identities and place us within a group/community/network (I know I am conflating these terms unfairly) that is driven by our professional interests. I am increasingly balking at the idea of professionalizing these spaces because I was hoping one of the results of twitter might enable us to rethink professionalization. And this is not to say it can;t, but the more I see it used a a promotional tool, the more the issues of self-selecting networks, groups, crowds begins to ape some of the same issues we claim is ossifying traditional publishing. In other words, the codification of these networks and their relationship to texts and the promotion of them seems to reproduce much of the old dynamics we suggest these media are reinventing. Gardner’s comment starts to point to how we are thinking digital humanities in a manner that is specifically academic, and I think the manicule of the retweets here would go a long way to reinforce that point.

And to be fair, I seem to be having my own struggles with this idea of professionalizing these social media, and quantifying the impact it has on one’s career. Twitter started for me in March of 2007 as an intimate series of personal relationships versus what it has become (of my own doing) hundreds of professional contacts. Fact is, the more Twitter has become a space for professional contacts, loose relationships, and more generalized networking a la Facebook, the more its impact has eluded me. And don’t get me wrong, the professional contacts, recommendations, and relationships I have made there have been more than good to me, and I have personally benefitted greatly as a result. At the same time I think I am overly sensitive to using this space as one for promotion, closing ranks, and generally controlling the message rather than being controlled by it, or at least within it.

Makes me wonder how much the idea that the LOC will not archive all tweets will subtly change the dynamic of how we think and use twitter constantly know this is an historical record (or as you noted on twitter, a literary one). Out of just about every service I have used over the last five or six years I have constantly had the most strained and painful relationship with twitter due to the facet, as Bethany notes, that “share notions of fairness and propriety” often make this space far less interesting. And, more than that, criticism of moves (like say Profhacker to the Chornicle) becomes mute because everyone is afraid and mindful of proriety. This is where the network breaks down for me, the idea of owning the mean of production and controlling one’s voice outside these networks and larger media spaces seems far more important in my mind then one’s professional profile. And I have done just about everything I can to damage my profile in an attempt to let go of prorpity that, while having its place, often times puts us in ours.

I can appreciate these points because I’m using the same WordPress plugin (BackType Connect) on my own blog that Bethany uses here. My own readers have pointed out the irony of a list of seemingly mindless retweets on a post all about new forms of academic publishing.

But the fact that this stream of Twitter posts comes from a simple plugin that can be turned on and off in a jiffy suggests to me that it’s misleading to call these tweets advertisements or promotions. At the very least, they count as referrals, which are on the whole much more honest than what you’d find on Digg, Stumbleupon, etc.

But I’d go even further and argue that all these referrals provide a great deal of information. Since they link to the original tweets, there’s a sense of provenance, as well as a significant metadata to work with. You can observe that there are three major parallel retweet streams, which suggests something about networks and fragmented audiences. You can see that quite a few Twitterers actually forgo the retweet button and preface Bethany’s URL with their own insight or annotation. And you can click the icon on the top of the page to end up at BackType’s own aggregation of the conversation generated by the post, which includes comments from Twitter as well as other major social networking sites.

Yes, it’d be wonderful if more readers left actual comments. These will always push along the conversation more than a 140-character aside will. But I don’t want to disregard the power of Twitter to serve as a Renaissance manicule, pointing to interesting moments in a text (Kari Kraus suggested this manicule idea, appropriately enough, on Twitter).

Twitter is like any media form, trending toward tedium and duplication (just as our academic conferences do, as Bethany argues). But I still think Twitter offers more affordances—flexibility, agility, transparency, openness—to escape the trend than most media forms, especially the forms academics rely upon.

I keep hoping the digital humanities movement will recognize and celebrate the power it holds to disrupt–usefully disrupt–higher education itself. Sometimes I come awake at night worrying that the whole thing could collapse into another moment of conspicuous academic self-congratulation. Perhaps I’m simply feeling less a part of these discussions than I’d like to be–or perhaps it’s a larger fear that the discussion will inevitably turn into a new version of the worst experiences of grad school and the profession itself.

At any rate, Twitter’s democratization brings in not only those academics (alt or otherwise) who weren’t invited, but also those whose voices exist in other spheres of intelligence and thoughtful analysis outside of academe. Doug Engelbart, the father of interactive computing (and one of the wisest and boldest of computing philosophers), abandoned the idea of entering academia after earning his Ph.D., as the entire system seemed design to thwart (or ignore, or deride) the goal of augmenting human intellect.

Night thoughts, to be sure. I hope they’re helpful.

I do hope the emerging alt.academic scene doesn’t become another site for coolhunting, High Theory, and black-leather in-groupness. Unfortunately, the private conferences can lend themselves to a self-reinforcing A-List of academic celebrity du jour. That particular dragon always has one eye open. Cf. an important new book by Grant McCracken, “Chief Culture Officer.”

That said, once again, brilliant and eloquent post–and thanks.

But when you think about it, when I have several peoples in my network saying READ THIS! READ THIS! (and after reading it the push is certainly well-deserved) I have very little discourse and conversation around the topic. Who is re-blogging it, tracking back, actually interacting with the idea rather than pushing them back out. I hate when I get annoyed by these things because I start to sound like an old man when it comes to twitter, but at the same time your post demands some more involved discussion and thought rather than serial retweets. And I wonder where twitter fits in here, I’m not necessarily a twitter hater, I use it regularly, but at the same time I see the means through which an inside/outside congeal around this technology and the idea of networks become closer to clubs that promote one another. All that said, I know there is no one way to use twitter, and everyone has their own agenda and that makes sense, but I still bemoan a bit of what twitter has done to blogging and commenting—even though I know it is an untenable position.

Anyway, here is to bucking the retweet trend in your comment thread