You need to build a community, which isn’t hard, and you need to be civil. You don’t have to participate in the craziness. Sure, you can’t avoid it, some will always come your way. But if you don’t respond, you won’t get that much of it.
I’ve been on Twitter since October 2011. The number of people I’m following (currently 1526) exceeds the number that follow me (812). But that’s OK. I suppose I’m mostly in what you might call academic twitter. I converse with people in digital humanities, literary studies, cognitive science, computer science, AI, neuroscience and a bit of this and that. Often enough I’ll post links to some of my papers; people will even read them.
Sometimes we just post and exchange information, often links to interesting papers or intellectual events. Every so often we’ll engage in a conversation that may involve 4, 5, 6, or more people and 20, 30, or more tweets over the course of a day or two. Usually these just spring up, without notice.
Despite the character limitation on individual tweets, it’s possible to get real work done this way. In the first place, we know one another, though many times a newcomer will show up, new to me if not everyone else. That’s always nice. You can attach diagrams or snippets of texts to tweets, which expands the range of communication. You can string tweets together into a thread 3, 4, 9, 15, or more tweets long.
This doesn’t happen every day; if it did I’d never get anything done. It doesn’t even happen every week. But two or three times a month I’ll find myself in an engaging extended conversation. Shorter conversations – 1, 2, 3 people, a half dozen to a dozen tweets – are more common.
To be sure, it’s not like academic blogging used to be, where half a dozen or people would make extensive comments on a single topic over the course of two or three days, but it’s still substantial. There’s a bit of that old intellectual magic still around, at Language Log, and Crooked Timber, in my world. I check those places daily, sometimes read something, and occasionally comment. Then there’s Marginal Revolution, which I frequent mainly for links to other stuff. Sometimes there will be a nice conversational run on Facebook. And then there’s Twitter, which is something different.
Things change, no?
I also post photographs regularly. Sometimes it’s just a photograph or three. I may attach a photo to a message I’m sending. I belong to a group called Daily Picture Theme, which is just what the name suggests. The theme setter, I don’t know they’re name, but I believe they live in England, posts a theme each day and we then post photos matching that theme. There about 1K of us, not a lot, but enough. Some days I don’t have a photo I think appropriate, so I don’t post. Some days I’ll post several. It’s very informal and fun.
As for Elon Musk, we’ll see. At this point it’s not entirely clear that he’s buying. If he does, it’ not at all clear that whatever he does will affect my local twitter. It’s local only in the sense it’s the people I know, close to me. Those people are distributed all over the world.
There was nothing like that in the good old days.
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