Why quote tweeting as a form of reply is creepy

I’ve edited the final two paragraphs of this post for clarity because an awful lot of people read it and thought I was criticising quote tweeting rather than one particular use of it.

Imagine you were sitting in a cafe having a conversation with a friend. You greeted each other warmly when they arrived, you ordered coffees and sat down to catch up. But something immediately began to feel a little off. Your friend appeared distracted, not quite there and continually looking at their phone. Worse than that, every time they said something to you they began frantically typing on the device. When you eventually questioned their distraction, the friend calmly explained to you that they are perfectly engaged in the conversation but they are transcribing it via e-mail for hundreds of people, many of whom you don’t know.

What would you think if this happened? Now imagine this was not a friend but a perfect stranger. Imagine you’d been having a conversation with someone you know, this stranger had overheard it and immediately sat next to you and inserted themselves into the dialogue. If this took place at an event designed to encourage mingling between people who don’t know each other then this might seem overly forward but not out of the ordinary. The problem would be the lack of introduction, their immediately jumping into the conversation, rather than that you didn’t know them.

But imagine they began transcribing the conversation via e-mail for an unknown audience. What would be irritating in the case of the person you know and like becomes unnerving and off-putting in the case of the stranger. This is what I suggest quote tweeting as a form of reply amounts to and I’m bewildered by people who do it.

For avoidance of doubt: I’m talking about people who consistently use quote tweets in lieu of the reply function, broadcasting their conversation to every single one of their followers. This isn’t an attack on quote tweeting but rather a query as to why some people persistently choose to use it rather than using the familiar reply functionality which has been part of the platform for a long time. Replies are only seen by people who follow both of you whereas quote tweets are seen by everyone follows you. It therefore increases the visibility of the exchange to the maximum possible extent, regardless of the context or intentions of the conversational partner.

I find it unsettling to be on the receiving end of this behaviour and this short post is an attempt to think through and explain why it feels problematic to me. I find myself increasingly suspicious of people who persistently do this and in some instances, it strikes me as a red flag for some really unpleasant habits which can be found far too readily within the academic Twittersphere.

CfP: Twitter: Global Perspectives, Uses and Criticisms

Contributors are invited to submit abstracts (about 200 words) toward our
new edited collection *Twitter: Global Perspectives, Uses and Criticisms*
to be published by Nova Science (New York). We are interested in new
research and perspectives on, as well as criticisms of *Twitter
communication*.

Topics being covered (though not limited to these) include:

· *Perspectives and concepts in Twitter communication*

· *Methods & techniques in Twitter studies/research*

· *Practices and uses of Twitter (e.g. business, journalism,
education *

* etc.)*

· *Activism, campaigning and political discourse on Twitter*

· *Criticisms and the future of Twitter*

*Kindly note the following important dates*

*Abstract Submission deadline: May 31st 2018*

*Chapter Submission deadline: August 30th 2018*

The contributions for this edited book are intended to range from
4,000-10,000 words (chapters over 10,000 words can be updated by the author
for the e-version of their chapter).

Publication will be about *3-9 months* after the close of the volume.

Please, send your chapter proposals/chapters to:

innocent.chiluwa@covenantuniversity.edu.ng and/or gwen.bouvier@mu.ie

A quick guide to managing organisational social media accounts

Over the last five years, I’ve managed a vast assortment of institutional social media feeds. These have included academic departments, research projects, journals, research networks, academic blogs and event series. I’ve included a selection of Twitter accounts I’ve solely or jointly managed below and I’ll show some of these in the session I’m doing at University of East Anglia on Thursday afternoon. I fell into this work as a part-time PhD student, with managing my department’s Twitter feed and blog being a really useful source of part-time income. My primary focus in the post and in the session will be on Twitter but the same framework I outline can just as easily be used for other social media platforms. There are platform specific questions about content and engagement differences which I can go into more detail about in the second half of the session.

It’s something I’ve taken on in a whole range of different capacities since then, some paid and others voluntary, leading me to spend a lot of time reflecting on what this role entails, how to do it effectively and what it means to do it well. The ones I currently manage are @TheSocReview, @CPGJCam, @Soc_Imagination, @TheorySchool, @GraphicSocSci and @AcceleratedUni. There are others I haven’t included here because I’m not sure how useful they are as examples. This might seem like a lot but, as I will explain, scheduling software makes this far less time consuming than it would otherwise be. The Sociological Review takes up a significant amount of my time, but with the partial exception of CPGJ (co-curated with Jana Bacevic) none of the others are remotely time consuming.

Feeds like this serve an important purpose, enabling organisations to communicate with an immediacy and regularity which was previously difficult to sustain, even if devices like e-mail lists could sometimes serve this purpose. For those directly involved with an organisation or network, they might be a relatively peripheral feature of their interaction with it. However they are increasingly becoming the most regular point of contact for those who aren’t directly involved, creating a presence for the organisation where there previously wasn’t one but creating a whole series of challenges in the process.

In the rest of this post, I go through these challenges citing some of the examples above and offering some solutions to them. I suggest we can see this as a three-stage process (identity, curation and engagement) with different issues raised by each stage. If you want to develop an audience on social media, it’s necessary to share material which is useful and relevant to them. This requires being clear about the identity of your organisation, the interests of your intended audience and finding material you can share which is consistent with your identity and interesting to your audience. There are many things which might generate a reaction from your audience (e.g. a Buzzfeed listicle) but if they’re not consistent with your identity then you probably shouldn’t post them.

What is the identity of your organisation?

The Sociological Review has been “publishing research and insight for the sociology community for over 100 years”. We have a manifesto which argues that “[d]ramatic economic and political changes in many parts of the world desperately require interventions from sociologists, both intellectually and through individual and collective engagement”. The journal has an historical grounding in Sociology, being the first journal for the discipline in the UK, but looks beyonds it to encompass criminology, human geography, social anthropology and other cognate fields. It recognises the history of these disciplines while seeing real development as occurring at the boundaries between them. It looks forward and back, learning from its history while seeking to explore new frontiers as we move into the future.
Culture, Politics and Global Justice is located in an education department and frames itself as concerned with interrogating ‘education’ in terms of the social institutions, governing projects, political economies, knowledge systems, educational processes and the socio-cultural production of identities at work within it. This requires ongoing engagements with social and cultural theory, as new developments in each of the substantive areas pose new methodological and theoretical challenges. In this sense, it sees itself as outward looking, working across a range of domains while sharing a concern to develop theoretical understandings which support a critical politics.
The Practice of Social Theory is a summer school concerned with the practice of social theory. It sees the question of what it is to do theory as often overlooked, lost in a rush towards theoretical argument. For this reason, it’s focus is practical and seeks to draw attention to the activities theorists engage in, how theory is produced, rather than the theories themselves which often receive the most attention. This leaves it with a pedagogical orientation, concerned with how theory is taught, but in the sense of theorising as an activity rather than theories as substantive outputs.

What do you share with your audience which reflects that identity?

If you are managing an organisational account, I’d strongly recommend using software like Buffer. This allows you to define a posting schedule then populate the feed at regular intervals, without the requirement of being online constantly. To begin with aim to post twice a day before working upwards, as you get more used to using the software and your curation process becomes more habitual. This is what the Buffer looks like for the International Journal of Social Research Methodology where I’m social media associate editor:

Once you start using this software, it’s useful to set Twitter updates to e-mail you when you are mentioned or get a direct message. Otherwise it’s easy to miss people’s interaction with you and this can make the account appear unresponsive over time. I’d suggest continuing to log in on a regular basis as well, even in the absence of engagement. Finding new people to follow, keeping your profile details updated and browsing your stream are an important way to keep in touch with your audience. I’ll talk more about this towards the end.

This raises an obvious question: who are your audience? What do you know about them? What are they interested in? This might seem like a contrived execise but being as specific as possible about it will be helpful. The more concretely you can identify who they are, why they might be interested in what you are doing on social media and how you might want to influence their behaviour, the more successful you will be at managing your institutional social media account. Here are some examples:

The Sociological Review is a general sociology journal, with international scope, while also cutting across disciplinary boundaries. Therefore the audience is straight-forwardly sociologists, anthropologists, criminologists, geographers and others from related disciplines. This encompasses all career stages and in the last two years, we’ve begun using Instagram and starting using Facebook much more intensively in order to try and connect with the demographic on there which we know to be slightly different to our Twitter audience e.g. more international, younger, less likely to be academics. Through this activity, we are trying to increase the visibility and readership of the journal (including increasing submissions to the journal) and promote events and fundings schemes we operate.
Culture, Politics and Global Justice is a new research cluster with an interdisciplinary focus. The current priority is to increase its visibility amongst people working in key substantive areas such as the study of platforms and to ensure our profile within Education. This then provides the bedrock for promoting a programme of events which aim to build an audience both within Cambridge and in the wider academic community. The focus is therefore on relevant academics within Cambridge and beyond it.
The Practice of Social Theory has a very specific audience of self-identified social theorists currently undertaking PhDs or having recently graduated. The original focus was to ensure lots of applicants for the summer school but it also sought to generate debate on key themes addressed in the summer school, as well as to create an appealing identity for the project which could be leveraged into future summer schools. In other words: we wanted people to apply for the first summer school and be aware of the project with a view to applying for subsequent summer schools, as well as distributing details to others who might want to apply.

Once you have a sense of your identity and your audience, it becomes a matter of identifying content which can be shared with them. Keeping track of people within your organisation is key to this, including through Twitter so you can see what they are sharing themselves. Here are some examples of internal updates, though be wary of how well distributed these are because of the possibility you might inadvertently end up promoting certain members rather than others, creating bad feeling:

New books, chapters and papers
Guest blog posts and op-eds produced
Talks and lectures which have been filmed
Media appearances or multimedia production
Events being organised and projects being funded
Calls for contributions or announcements of schemes
New appointments, departures and other institutional news

Unless you work in a department or large centre, there will only be a limited number of announcements of these sorts. Even if there are lots, your account will be boring if this is all you include. Therefore you need to identify additional content which can be added into the mix that will be relevant to your audience and consistent with your identity. This could be repurposed: are there people giving talks which you could persuade to blog about them, presentations which could be recorded or images which could be taken at events? But it can also be identified elsewhere and, if you use a tool like an RSS reader (see below), it is less onerous than it sounds to find a couple of relevant pieces of content each day which could be shared. This allows you to keep track of a vast array of websites, browsing new updates sequentially and easily adding them into your posting schedule:

To illustrate this, I’d like to take a look at the recent contents of each feed. In the session, I’ll go through these on the overhead projector but if you’re reading this as a blog post, please click on the links below to take a look.

How do you engage with your audiences in a way consistent with that identity?

Once you get to this stage, you should have a sense of a content stream (e.g. two posts per day on two platforms) and potential sources which can be added into it. There might be a lot of setup time to get to this stage but implementing it is quite straight forward. Depending on how onerous your schedule is, allocate a certain period of time each week (e.g. two sessions of one hour each) to curating content for the scheme. With this investment of time, it becomes possible to keep a vibrant and dynamic social media presence going while not even thinking about it for a great deal of your working week. If you setup notifications so you know when someone communicates directly with you, much engagement becomes an ad hoc process which is easily manageable.

However another side to engagement is continuing to grow the account. There are numerous ways to build your audience: identify similar accounts and follow people who are following them, tagging other accounts when you share their content, promoting your account through e-mail and on websites, live tweeting from the account at prominent events or announce your account at events you organise. Each of these might be individually trivial but the cumulative effect, if you pursue them regularly alongside a curation strategy like the one described below, will be substantial. It also very platform specific and in many ways it’s most straight forward on Twitter. But as well as platform specific tricks (e.g. hashtags and locations on Instagram, following to encourage follow backs on Twitter, finding viral content on Facebook) and cross-platform promotion (i.e. encouraging people on one platform to follow you on another) there is an underlying mechanism at work: if you share content which is appealing to your audience, in a regular and systematic way, the audience will come to you!

Engaging in a way consistent with your identity can be tricky. There’s a risk that people within your organisation and/or your audience object to what you’re sharing. Therefore it’s often best to err on the side of caution when choosing content. Likewise statements which, like it or otherwise, will be interpreted as being on behalf of the organisation. I try to stick to a neutral voice because of the risks involved in doing otherwise. This can make interaction tricky. At risk of stating the obvious, someone having asked you a question on social media doesn’t mean you have to answer it on social media (or at all). If you want to ensure you’re responsive, invite people to e-mail the question instead of discussing it in public. Furthermore, never get drawn into a debate or an argument while you’re the voice of an organisation on social media. At best, it won’t cause any harm and, at worst, it will be a disaster. Obviously there’s much more to say on the issue of engagement but hopefully these general principles will prove useful for helping you manage organisational social media feeds.

The meaning of @realdonaldtrump

How significant can a tweet can be? We can point to isolated cases of individual tweets going viral, creating controversy and producing material outcomes in the world. But isolated tweets rarely have such significance. Instead, we need to look at a Twitter feed as a unit of analysis, taking someone’s entire output on the platform as a sustained trajectory of action. This is precisely what Peter Oborne and Tom Roberts do in How Trump Thinks: His Tweets And the Birth of a New Political Language. It’s not a systematic analysis and there are clear limits to it e.g. the failure to state any principles upon which selections have been made from Trump’s output. But I found it a thought-provoking book, both in terms of understanding Trump’s self-formation as a political figure and how we might approach Twitter methodologically.

There are trivial though interesting biographical details which can be ascertained about Trump through the examination of the feed. For instance the consistency with which he tweets extremely early in the morning and very late at nights lends credence to his claim about sleeping little. Looking at how these tweets are sequenced raises fascinating questions about how Trump spends his time and the psychological state in which he takes to social media. From loc 4084:

In this extraordinary sequence of Tweets, despatched in less than two hours before dawn on 4 March, Donald Trump accused his predecessor of illegally tapping his phone and of being malevolent or mentally ill; attempted to conflate Obama’s routine meetings with the Russian Ambassador at the White House with Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s undeclared discussions during the election with the representative of a foreign power; and poured scorn on Arnold Schwarzenegger for his failure to sustain Trump’s TV franchise.

As they say, “Twitter is the medium which allows Trump to expose these thoughts to the world in real time”. Uses of Twitter which seems ill-judged can reveal much more about the user than their learned capacity to deploy it for personal gain. But the more important features, to which Osborne devotes much of his attention, concern his evolving strategy and relationship to the platform. He offers a plausible narrative of Trump coming to find his voice on Twitter, a process tied up with his developing preoccupation with the power of the platform and the reach it affords him:

My twitter account is now reaching more people than the New York Times-not bad. And we’re only going to get better! 11:14 AM –4 Apr 2012

With almost 1.3 million followers and rising really fast, everyone is asking me to critique things(and people). Finally, I will be a critic. 11:41 AM –11 Jun 2012

Today we just passed 1.4 million twitter followers.. 11:09 AM –23 Aug 2012

Happy to have just passed 1.3M Twitter followers. Love communicating with everyone daily. 3:51 PM –2 Jul 2012

Today we just passed 1.4 million twitter followers.. 11:09 AM –23 Aug 2012

Happy to have just passed 1.5M followers on twitter. We picked up over 14,000 yesterday alone. It’s great to speak to everyone daily. 10:31 AM –4 Oct

My twitter followers will soon be over 2 million-& all the “biggies.” It’s like having your own newspaper. 10:07 AM –17 Oct 2012

Wow, I have just exceeded 2 million followers-and in such a short time! 10:38 AM –14 Jan 2013

Obviously in no sense does he ‘reach’ this headline figure. There is a revealing naïveté about how he treats this follower count, something it is hard to ascribe to a strategy of simply trumpeting his own demonstrable advance in social media status. We can’t know that he cares about this stuff. But the evidence suggests that he does. His preoccupation with the size of his following is allied with an irritation that not all the reaction he generates is positive:

It’s okay but why do the haters (& losers) want to follow me on twitter?? Get a life! 1:39 PM –12 Feb 2013

My Twitter has been seriously hacked-and we are looking for the perpetrators. 12:00 PM –21 Feb 2013

Twitter will soon be irrelevant if lowlifes are so easily able to hack into accounts. 1:57 PM –21 Feb 2013

I have many great people but also an amazing number of haters and losers responding to my tweets-why do these lowlifes follow nothing to do! 3:34 AM –24 Apr 2013

Wow, I’m at 2,200,000 followers but I’d love to get rid of the haters & losers—they’re such a waste of time! 11:50 AM –25 Apr 2013

But it ultimately seems to be worth it. On numerous occasions he draws the analogy between his personal platform on social media and owning a newspaper. When he enters the presidential race, he styles social media as facilitating his one-man fight back against a crooked established which is stacked against him. Driven by the value he finds in the platform, he continues to celebrate numerical milestones as his Twitter career continues:

“@Heaveenly: @realDonaldTrump how does it feel to have 2.1 million followers” Great like owning The New York Times without the lo$$es! . 8:04 PM –7 May 2013

Just hit a million on Facebook-http://t.co/FDv4aLoomz

Wow, honored to just pass 2.5M followers on @twitter. Thanks to all my followers. We are going to have a great year together.

Congrats everyone-we topped 4 million today on Twitter-and heading up fast! 1:41 PM –1 Sep 2015

He writes about his tweeting in terms of a relationship with his followers and a personal capacity he excels it. As he put it in a Tweet from July 2014, “Many people have said I’m the world’s greatest writer of 140 character sentences”. His professed skill at tweeting is what underwrites his imagined relationship with his followers. Through his skill, he builds a relationship with his followers and through the ever-expanding platform that ensues, he accumulates power. As he declares on 17 Oct 2012, “My twitter has become so powerful that I can actually make my enemies tell the truth.”

He regularly reflects on the specific practices which lead him to accumulate followers:

Everybody’s talking about my doing twitter during the likely very boring debate tonight. @realDonaldTrump #DemDebate 10:09 AM – 13 Oct 2015

#DemDebate was really boring but had a lot of fun live tweeting and picked up by far the most followers. 9:57 AM – 14 Oct 2015

Brian–Thanks dummy–I picked up 70,000 twitter followers yesterday alone. Cable News just passed you in the ratings. 12:14PM -7 Nov 2012

This includes retweeting his followers, selectively landing a platform to those without visibility, resonant of his election rhetoric about the forgotten, at least when they talk in a way congruent with his own ego:

“@redneckgp: All you haters out there, STOP trashing the only candidate @realDonaldTrump that will put ALL OF YOU & AMERICA FIRST #trump” 9:32 PM –8 Apr 2016

Dennis Bryant (Twitter handle “RedneckGP”) at this point had seventy-five Twitter followers. He suddenly found himself retweeted to Trump’s then 8 million followers. Trump loved to lift his supporters from obscurity. This was one way he established an emotional bond with his supporters.

“@phickeyma: When I come home from work my Twitter page is filled with Donald Trump tweets…Love reading them…So Bold & Truthful.” 5:36 PM –18 Oct 2013

Trump loved to retweet messages from his followers, thus forging a personal bond with voters. In the election year of 2016 Retweets would come to form approximately half of his Twitter output.

What interests me is his developing relationship with the metrics. As he sustains his engagement on the platform, he reports upon his own ‘progress’ in ever more granular ways. He’s concerned with what ‘works’ and what doesn’t. He has data about his ‘growth’ ready-to-hand. There is a relational biography here concerning himself and the platform, as well as the real and imagined relationship it facilitates to his followers. I’m interested in what this case illustrates about imagination and social media, how numbers become means through which dreams come to seem realisable. I’ll come back to this in a later post but I couldn’t resist ending on this tweet:

With almost 1.3 million followers and rising really fast, everyone is asking me to critique things(and people). Finally, I will be a critic. 1141 AM – 11 Jun 2012

Why it’s fine to ‘broadcast’ on Twitter

Foremost amongst the guidance offered about Twitter is the claim that it is fundamentally a conversational platform. One shouldn’t simply ‘broadcast’. It’s for discussion and engagement. There’s an element of truth in this but it’s one which can be lost through repetition, as the status of received wisdom stops us from thinking critically about why everyone agreed with it in first place.

Rather than seeing Twitter as conversational, we should perhaps see it as connective. Connectivity in this sense in something automated, it’s a technology for sorting people in a way that encourages interaction between them. Connectivity in this sense is, as Jose van Dijck puts it, “a quantifiable value, also known as the popularity principle: the more contacts you have and make, the more valuable you become, because more people think you are popular and hence want to connect with you.”

Connectivity presupposes interaction. Unless people interact on platforms, connectivity is thwarted. In this limited sense, it is true to say that someone is not using Twitter correctly if they are not interacting. The value in the platform simply won’t be realised by them because they won’t make new contacts, they won’t increase the visibility of their action on it and they won’t accumulate ‘popularity’. But why does popularity matter? Unless there’s a clear answer to this question, one possibility for which is simply that “it doesn’t“, it’s likely the platform incentives are substituting for the reflexivity of the user.

My concern is that invocations of Twitter as conversational help naturalise this architecture. They promulgate the idea that one is ‘doing it wrong’ unless they are tweeting hyperactively, precluding the possibility of each user coming to their own assessment about the utility or otherwise of the platform for them. This is important because there are some really profound limitations to Twitter as a platform, as Richard Seymour usefully recounts:

Of course, it is established by now that the ambiguities of language are always exaggerated in the 140 character format. Polysemy catches people out all the time on Twitter, something we all have to be on guard about. But it does so all the more because quite a large number of people are only paying attention to the extent that it enables them to say something in turn, however inventively disingenuous, which will generate ‘likes’ and ‘retweets’. This is how the Twittering machine works, and people use it at their own peril. Nonetheless, unless we make some fairly authoritarian/paranoid assumptions, users also have to be responsible for their own readings.

http://www.leninology.co.uk/2017/03/smash-twittering-machine.html?m=1

The ritual incantation that Twitter is for conversation functions as the faith which keeps the great Twittering machine in operation. Unless we’re willing to abandon it entirely, we need to have serious discussions about what Seymour calls ‘coping strategies’ to obviate its more undesirable characteristics from creating problems. Part of this involves recognising pseudo-catharsis and trying to distinguish ranting at someone from something which can provide the basis for a productive discussion, in spite of the profound channel constraints. Otherwise, I think we’ll ultimately be pushed towards something more akin to Seymour’s approach, which is pretty much as far as I think you can go before you’re effectively giving up on the platform.

I don’t want to tell Jacobin what to do about all this but, in general, it seems to me that the only sensible policy with regard to Twitter is one of disciplined refusal to debate, argue, or even engage beyond at most light conversation or minor clarifications. It can be used for narrowcasting, advertising events, and sharing links, but if people lose their shit, they should simply be ruthlessly ignored, as difficult as that is. If mistakes are genuinely made, they should be deleted and briefly acknowledged. If longer responses are called for, they should be written later, and not published in the form of a Twitter thread, on a separate ‘timeline’. But the ‘mentions’ column should be ignored, and no one should be treated as if they’re entitled to a response. People should be told in the bio line that if they want a response on a substantive issue, they have to email — meaning, they have to put some effort and thought into what they say. This is not a long-term solution, but a coping strategy.

http://www.leninology.co.uk/2017/03/smash-twittering-machine.html?m=1

Social media and populism

This excellent essay by Jan-Werner Müller in the London Review of Books raises an important issue about the forms of political mobilisation facilitated by social media:

Trump has called himself the Hemingway of the 140 characters. He has ‘the best words’. He loves Twitter, he says, because it’s like having one’s own newspaper, but without the losses. Twitter shares something of the echo-chamber effect of Facebook, but it also makes possible a form of direct identification between the individual citizen and the supposedly sole authentic representative of the people. It is hard to see how this might have been possible before, at least as a matter of daily experience: perhaps going to a party rally and feeling a direct connection with the leader while surrounded by others who feel exactly the same thing. Now, that sense of a direct link is just a click away, day and night: ‘Hey, I’m up at 3 a.m., and so is he, and he’s thinking exactly what I was just thinking!’

This is an illusion, but it is a powerful one. Media-savvy politicians can exploit it in unprecedented ways. For instance, in Italy the anti-establishment Five Star movement emerged from Beppe Grillo’s blog. ‘Hey folks, it works like this: you tell me what’s going on and I will play the amplifier,’ he’d written to his followers. Grillo had been a well-known comedian before entering politics. He has never merely amplified the concerns of ordinary people; the way il popolo speaks is decisively shaped by his leadership even though he has no official position of authority. Trump of course had also been a TV star, someone partly famous for being famous. But the peculiarity of Trump is that he seems the equivalent of Grillo and Silvio Berlusconi merged into one person. Whenever he was accused during the campaign of being just an entertainer, he could point to his competence as a businessman; whenever it was pointed out that his ventures mostly went bankrupt, he could respond that he was primarily a media star.

What forms of political organisation emerge from such a dynamic? Fleeting and fragile ones, predicated on imagined links with the leader rather than relational bonds between the followers. This gives reason to be hopeful but it also creates dangerous incentives for the leader, inviting them to escalate their rhetoric in order to mobilise a base over whom, at least as a collective, their hold remains unreliable. The problem is, as he puts it later in the essay, “The supply of enemies is inexhaustible.”

This is why it’s so important to refuse the story such populists tell about their own success. They ascribe an outcome with complex origins to their own quasi-magical powers to connect with ‘the people’:

Liberals have been wringing their hands at their seeming inability to reach citizens with ‘fact-checks’ and incontrovertible demonstrations of Trump’s continual self-contradictions. It’s curious that in their despair they have resurrected some of the clichés of 19th-century mass psychology. While disputing virtually every claim made by populists – especially their supposedly simplistic policy solutions – they buy without question the story that populists sell about their own successes. When Arron Banks proclaims that ‘Facts don’t work … You’ve got to connect with people emotionally,’ they just nod. But it isn’t true that ‘the masses’ are emotional basket-cases ready to be seduced by a charismatic demagogue. For a start, the neat distinction between reason and emotion is misleading. People are angry for a reason, and usually they can articulate that reason, as part of a larger story about what went wrong in their lives. Trump gained some trust as an outsider and, even more, as a credible exemplar of what it means to be unprofessional in politics. Some trusted him because he told it like it is; but in other cases the trust came first, and led them to believe that he was telling them the real story.

is Twitter making the Internet local again?

In his fascinating book Spam: a Shadow History of the Internet, Finn Brunton offers an example on pg 23-24 of how the early ARPANET was local in a way that is no longer the case.

in September 1973, computer scientist Leonard Kleinrock used his ARPANET connection in Los Angeles to get back the electric razor he’d left at a conference in Brighton. He knew his friend Larry Roberts would probably be online (logged in at a terminal in Brighton to a mainframe in Cambridge) and could retrieve it and hand it off to someone going to Los Angeles. He reached across the transcontinental, trans-Atlantic network as though leaning over a fence, shouting across the street.

I was struck by the thought that I retrieved a laptop charger in precisely the same way via Twitter. Is this platform making the Internet local again? By which I mean that network activity often forms largely around professional networks with a substantial degree of prior face-to-face interaction and the facilitation of further face-to-face interaction through digitally mediated contact?

digital micro-politics and digital macro-politics

In a number of books, Nikos Mouzelis offers a really important critique of the tendency to equate ‘micro’ with face-to-face and ‘macro’ with impersonal and international. He cites an international summit, Yalta if I remember correctly, as an example of a face-to-face encounter that is very much macro. I was thinking about this when reading former Labour spin doctor Lance Price’s slightly weird and fawning book about Modi. Reflecting on Modi’s use of Twitter after his election victory, Price writes in The Modi Effect page 240:

Modi had gone from ‘pariah to prime minister’, according to one of his colleagues, who added, ‘This is nothing short of a miracle.’ And this being 2014, to the victor came the tweets. Led by David Cameron, who had told him, ‘It’s great to be talking to someone who just got more votes than any other politician anywhere in the universe,’ world leaders were busy following up their phone calls by finding 140 characters in which to say congratulations. The New York Times read a political snub into the order in which he chose to acknowledge them. First came the UK, then Canada, Russia, Japan, South Africa, France and Germany. ‘As the list of nations grew throughout the India day, the leader of the biggest western power, President Obama, began to look more and more like the kid who was picked last for teams during recess.’ Modi hadn’t forgotten that the United States had been the last, and most begrudging, of the western governments to invite him back into the diplomatic fold. Eventually, after thanking New Zealand and Fiji, Modi tweeted, ‘@ BarackObama & I talked about further strengthening India– USA strategic partnership that will help both nations.’

This suggests to me how conceptual confusions surrounding ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ might have implication for digital sociology. Obviously the ANT tendency within digital sociology will want to dispense with these distinctions altogether. But in a future post, I’ll try and outline why I think they’re necessary for an adequate digital social science (not just a digital sociology) even though they must be treated very carefully.

the coming copyright wars on twitter

This is a very interesting trend, though one I suspect could lead in some unfortunate directions:

Ever been the victim of plagiarism on Twitter—or, dare we say, the shameful purveyor of it? The social network seems to be putting an end to those pirated tweets by cracking down on users who steal jokes to inflate their Twitter cred.

The Twitter account @plagiarismbad reported Saturday that Twitter had taken down five tweets that poached a joke allegedly first posted by freelance writer Olga Lexell:

The tweets were removed at Lexell’s request, and in their place reads text that says they were “withheld in response to a report from the copyright holder.” In a tweet, Lexell explained the rationale behind her appeal, noting that the jokes were her “intellectual property” and copied without attribution

http://www.fastcompany.com/3049084/fast-feed/copied-someones-joke-on-twitter-your-tweet-may-be-deleted?partner=rss

It seems obviously valuable that a mechanism for this is in place, but it’s nonetheless worrying when one considers the potential scale of the contestation that might emerge when this becomes widespread. Will Twitter commit to providing the resources to ensure robust governance? Or will they merely err on the side of caution and take material down unless the arguments given in the counter-notice are overwhelmingly strong? On its own, this would be problematic. But as the article correctly identifies, the potential for such a system to be deliberately misused is vast:

This sounds like good news for writers and comedians who have been victims of joke theft, but as Twitter revealed in a transparency report last year, many organizations cry copyright theft even when the material in question does not meet those requirements. The Verge reports that about one-third of Twitter’s requests are not actually copyright violations—and some, in fact, are just attempts to censor criticism

http://www.fastcompany.com/3049084/fast-feed/copied-someones-joke-on-twitter-your-tweet-may-be-deleted?partner=rss

How to live tweet effectively at academic conferences

This useful post on the Pickle Jar blog offers some pointers about effective live tweeting. I agree it’s important to remember that most (?) people reading your live tweets won’t be in the room with you and thus will be confused by any features of the context you take for granted in your tweets. In that sense, I think this is excellent advice:

Context is key. If you’re sending a tweet out into the world, assume your audience knows very little. If you hear something interesting, try to share it as if you’re sharing words of wisdom with someone who wasn’t there. Feel free to paraphrase, and take pictures of the slides if there’s just too much amazing stuff on there for 140 characters. Those who aren’t there will get something out of it, and those that are will have a reminder that they can re-tweet or favourite.

http://www.picklejarcommunications.com/2015/04/15/a-bluffers-guide-to-being-useful-at-conferences/

But surely live tweeting also serves a purpose for people within the room? The experience of live tweeting has often lived up to the rhetoric of the ‘back channel’: offering an outlet for both exchange with and awareness of other people at the event, many of whom I’ve never previously met. There are obviously risks posed by this (a topic for another post) but it’s also something that can introduce a novel sociality into what might otherwise be a large and impersonal event.

This is why I think it’s important to distinguish between the official live-tweeter (scene setter, context communicator and summariser in chief) and the voluntary live-tweeting of others at the event. Part of the role of the former is to encourage the latter through regular retweets and rapid responses to any questions. But another crucial part is to provide a sufficient sense of the context to ‘outsiders’ for the flurry of activity taking place amongst ‘insiders’ to be comprehensible and engaging. The insider activity isn’t a threat to the quality of the live tweeting, it’s rather what can make a hashtag fascinating to read if there is someone mediating between the two in order to ensure that ‘insiders’ don’t exclude ‘outsiders’ by taking their shared context for granted.

There are numerous ways to establish context: regular reminders of what the hashtag is (e.g. “We’re live tweeting from @BritSoci conference day 2, #BritSoc15”), taking pictures of the venue itself to convey a sense of place, regular statements of the schedule (e.g. “Our next speaker is @mark_carrigan from @SocioWarwick talking about social ontology of social movements”) and signalling openness to queries (e.g. “If you have any questions about #BritSoc15, whether you’re here or not, please get in touch!”). This kind of activity can help if you’re subsequently using the hashtag as a basis to compile a report of the event by providing way marks to make sense of what can be a vast stream of activity. But more importantly I think it also contributes to the accessibility of the event, structuring what might otherwise be an intimidating mass of communication and doing so in a way which encourages it to grow.

There’s a really important suggestion later in the Pickle Jar post which I’ve only recently started doing myself:

One way to really add some useful background is to start digging up links. Is the person on stage mentioning a project they worked on? Dig up a link to that project (or better still, a video about it), and share that on the conference hashtag. Do they have a personal site, with background detail? Go find it, and share it. It may seem like a bit of a slog, but Google is your friend here.

http://www.picklejarcommunications.com/2015/04/15/a-bluffers-guide-to-being-useful-at-conferences/

I prefer to live tweet on a phone but I’m planning in future to always use my laptop for this reason. If someone mentions a paper they’ve written, look it up and tweet the link! Tweet the institutional profile of the speaker and always ensure you link to their personal twitter feed and tag the department as well if they have a twitter presence. In this sense, the official live tweeter does a large part of the ‘networking’ in order that other people don’t have to.

There’s suggestions later in the post which I’ve experimented with in the past but found people quite reluctant to participate in. Perhaps it’s how I’m phrasing it? But the promise of Audioboom for micro-podcasts with speakers really fascinates me and I’ve love to find a way to suggest this possibility to speakers that doesn’t immediately make them recoil in horror:

While you’re there, how about tracking a few speakers down for an audio interview? We’ve already chatted about the possibilities of platforms such as Audioboom, and you can use these with little more than a smartphone and a quiet sideroom or corridor.

If video’s more your thing, why not provide some great content for curators and your followers by capturing a quick chat or a tech demo using Youtube Capture, Vine, or Instagram Video? Or if you’ve got an audience that isn’t in a wildly-different timezone, why not livestream an interview or a quick event summary using Periscope or Meerkat?

http://www.picklejarcommunications.com/2015/04/15/a-bluffers-guide-to-being-useful-at-conferences/

Using social media to improve the student experience: creating a departmental back channel for undergraduates

A few years ago when I was running the Twitter feed for the Sociology department at Warwick, I noticed how readily first year undergraduates tweeted practical questions to the account during their first few weeks of the first term. Students tweeted questions intermittently throughout the year but it was particularly marked at the start of their time within the department. As someone who spent 6 years studying the undergraduate experience, it’s not hard for me to understand why this would be so: the organisation the student has joined tends to seem rather large and they often feel they have only a superficial grasp on how it works.

What I find harder to answer is why universities haven’t seized upon social media as tool for improving the ‘student experience’. As well as the aforementioned questions, I noticed a few instances of forthcoming students tagging the department on Twitter prior to starting their degree. As a part-time PhD student with little practical involvement in the department beyond my role maintaining the twitter feed, I often found myself unable to answer the questions undergraduates had and struggling to welcome forthcoming students to the department in any meaningful way.

I find it easy to imagine how this could be done with social media in an effective way: inviting forthcoming students to engage with the department prior to joining it, encouraging them to address any questions they have to the twitter feed and checking in with the students on a semi-regular basis throughout their first year. It would require an investment though not a particular significant one – perhaps it could be factored into the workload allocation of an existing administrator? The work involved would be regular but fairly unsubstantial, necessitating that someone knowledgeable about the day-to-day life of the department were to prioritize twitter as a communications channel alongside e-mail.

My experience of the ‘back channel’ that Twitter provides at conferences is that it makes large and impersonal events feel friendly and accessible. Could the same effect be achieved with the student engagement project I’m outlining?

Resonance and subjectivity on twitter

In four years of using Twitter regularly, I’ve often found others tweeting things that resonate with me and vice versa. In fact one could plausibly suggest that these experiences play an important role in making continued use of the service appealing. What do I mean by ‘resonate’? I mean knowing where someone is coming from, understanding the reaction they’re expressing and sharing it to some extent. I would argue that resonance is an important factor to consider in understanding subjectivity within a changing social world – to understand where someone is coming from necessitates some degree of converging experience and circumstances. If everyone’s experience and circumstances are entirely particularistic then resonance becomes impossible. If everyone’s experience and circumstances tend towards homogeneity then resonance in interaction fades into the background and ceases to become a distinguishable phenomenon.

In this sense, I’d see resonance as an important micro-social mechanism engendering social integration: it helps translate objective commonalities into subjective commonalities. Experiences of resonance leave us with a sense that others understand where we are coming from and vice versa. The new forms of interaction facilitated by social media enable new ways in which objective commonalities can be translated into subjective commonalities. Things that previously couldn’t be a basis for subjective commonalities – because they rarely, if ever, entered into interaction – now can be and this has important social consequences. It would be easy to overlook the way in which something like Twitter can contribute to social integration because it is so empirically different to what we’re used to but I’d argue the same underlying mechanism is at work. It tends to increase the degree to which people feel a sense of commonality with a range of others with whom they interact and it does so because there are real underlying commonalities which facilitate this.

“I have no idea what to tweet about!”

Are you a social researcher who feels this way? Here are some ideas which might help:

Have you read any interesting papers recently? Link to them and briefly explain why you liked them.
Are you going to any conferences soon? Tweet that you’re going and ask if anyone else is.
Are there any new stories which connect to issues you address in your research? Link to them and explain why
Working on a presentation or a paper? Take one idea, try and express it succinctly then throw it on to twitter to see what reaction you get.
Have you read anything good recently that isn’t related to your research? Tweet about it and explain why.
Try to find other people working on similar issues to you. Tweet and ask! (e.g. “Does anyone know other people working on x, y, z?”)
Are there any blogs or other websites you follow that are connected to your research? Tweet and tell other people why you like them.
Are there policy or political conclusions which follow from your research findings? Explain what they are.
For that matter, what are your research findings? Tell people.
The most obvious one: link to your publications. Tell people what they’re about and why the work mattered to you.

How not to use twitter as an academic

I usually tend towards the view that there’s no right or wrong way to use social media. These evaluations only make sense relative to some prior purpose and so I’m sceptical when blog posts pronounce on the right way to use Twitter or parallel claims with other platforms. However I realise there are a few things which I do see as intrinsically negative things to do on twitter, at least if you want to build positive connections with others working in your field:

Don’t tweet everything you blog at people. It’s hard to build an audience as a blogger and a sense that no one is reading what you write can erode the enjoyment of blogging. But repeatedly tweeting links to new posts at people (i.e. “@soc_imagination my new blog post http://www.myblog.com”) is the digital equivalent of looking up phone numbers of people in your field and cold calling them to announce that you’ve done some writing. If there’s some particularly pressing reason why this one post needs to gain an audience then that’s fair enough but before you send it directly to scores of people, it’s worth thinking about whether you’d do this ‘offline’.
Don’t tweet requests for people to follow you back once you follow them. Much as with the first point, I’m surprised at how frequently I see people do this and more so they’ve done it with scores of people in quick succession. I understand the impulse to do it in some cases but again consider the ‘offline’ equivalent to this. I can’t quite work out what it would be but I’m sure it would be slightly creepy.
There’s no need to thank people for retweeting you. If you remark something in conversation and someone says “that’s interesting” would you say “thank you for finding my remark interesting”? Retweeting is usually some variant upon affirming that a tweet was interesting or valuable in some way. Thanking people for retweeting (or following for that matter) makes a momentary interaction feel creepily transactional to me.

What would you add to the list? If a certain number of people share an antipathy towards a way of acting on twitter then at what point should we start talking about these as norms?

Mark Carrigan

Tag: twitter