Editor's Note
This week’s guest post is by Zachary Kopin, who is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Michigan. He is writing a dissertation on the history of law in Plymouth Colony. He is spending his break in South Africa, developing public history programming for the Constitution Hill Museum.
Last month I attended the 2019 Society for US Intellectual History Conference at the New School in New York. Like many graduate students trying to reduce their out of pocket costs, I volunteered to work the registration desk in exchange for a fee waiver. I generally like working the registration desk at conferences. It’s an opportunity to meet everyone who comes in the door. Plus you get to observe the many small scenes that make up an academic meeting. After all, these gatherings are more than panels, plenaries, and roundtables.
Graduate students waiting for senior scholars to meet them for coffee, organizers scrambling when a supplier is late, junior scholars celebrating or commiserating with their friends depending on how a talk went; all of this can tell the observer a great deal about the health of the organization, the temperament of its leadership, and the values of its members. These incidents are not unusual. One instance I observed, however, seemed utterly remarkable.
Two attendees approached the registration table independently. One announced himself, while the other scrunched his face in puzzlement. He clearly recognized the first man’s name, but could not place him. Finally, the second man apologized to the first, shook his hand and explained his confusion. The first man thought for a minute and postulated “…from Twitter?” “Yes!” the second man replied. The two then embraced as old friends, began a conversation on political philosophy, and walked side by side to the plenary.
I’m not on twitter. Nor do I believe it to be a particular necessity for me. If anything really is worth seeing, someone usually screenshots it and sends it to me. Or someone writes about it in a blog. Perhaps, for those more involved in the twitter sphere or even other corners of the web, what I observed is a regular occurrence, but for me it was extraordinary. It forced me to reconsider what the function of twitter is in the modern academic space.
For these two colleagues, twitter was the forum for intellectual exchange. The conference was merely where their bodies came into interaction. The widespread use of twitter by academics has altered the way in which conferences function. Instead of being the site of rare engagement, the conference is now one among many.
While I was hardly a witness to the old ways of conferences, from what I understand they were the common forum for the exchange of ideas. Even if we are to acknowledge that twitter is a newcomer in the long history of correspondence functioning as an interchange for the exchange of ideas, the character limitations and short editing periods certainly have escalated and truncated the way in which those ideas are exchanged. Where scholars used to see their comrades a handful of times a year, they now engage with them everyday, even in some limited form. In this way strangers can become close friends.
I remain skeptical of twitter. In an era in which the medium has become a location for political cyber bullying, stalking, other forms of harassment, and performance, I don’t believe it to be worth the risk. For some, however, twitter is an answer to the various types of isolation that academic workloads force upon us. In that way I suppose it’s not all bad.
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