Twitter cares? Part Three: Is twitter bad for our souls?

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Here’s part three of my essay on caring with/through twitter. In part one, I introduce two twitter projects, Angie Jackson’s live-tweeting of her abortion and Steph Herold’s creation of the #ihadanabortion hashtag, and suggest that they are examples of using twitter to care about, for and with others. In part two, I provide an overview of the main critiques of these projects. Now, in this post, I will discuss more general critiques of twitter as discouraging ethical engagement and empathy.

Does twitter make us unethical?

While critics of Angie Jackson’s live-tweeting and Steph Herold’s #ihadanabortion hashtag tended to focus on the political and moral impact of tweeting about abortions, we can also link their charges against twitter as too trivial, too concerned with inappropriate oversharing and not meaningful enough with some more general critiques of twitter and its (lack of) ethical value.

Many critics are skeptical of twitter’s ethical potential. Peggy Orenstein worries that “when every thought is externalized” and “when we reflexively post each feeling,” we lose insight, reflection and, possibly empathy. Bill Keller echoes Orenstein’s concerns, writing that new technologies like twitter “may be eroding characteristics that are essentially human: our ability to reflect, our pursuit of meaning, a genuine empathy, a sense of community connected by something deeper than snark or political affinity” (Keller 2). Central to their concerns is the fate of empathy within the twitter age. Both believe that empathy is essential for being engaged, reflective and ethical citizens. And both caution that twitter is contributing to its erosion because it encourages people to be self-centered, superficial and apathetic to the experiences or wants and needs of others.

To support her case against twitter, Orenstein draws upon the findings of a recent study by the University of Michigan. In this study, researchers evaluated college students on seventy-two different campuses between 1979 and 2009 and determined that a sharp decline in empathy, particularly in terms of concern for others and the ability to take on others’ perspectives, has occurred since 2000. In evaluating the causes of this decline, Konrath et. al propose that the students’ increased time online, particularly in social media spaces like facebook or twitter, has possibly been a factor. As students spend more time online, the authors argue, their offline engagements and relationships have suffered; students are less able to effectively interact with others offline, they spend less time in offline activities, and they have less close friends offline with which to share their private feelings (188). Additionally, social media’s overemphasis on self-expression and individual wants and needs coupled with its overabundance of personal accounts of pain and violence, could be fueling the narcissism of “Generation Me” and desensitizing them to the suffering of others (187).

Both Orenstein and Konrath et. al speculate that a decline in empathy is at least partly the result of social media. However, this conclusion, which is based only on anecdotal evidence1, does not account for the ways in which using social media like twitter might actually allow for users to be more, as opposed to less, empathetic. In Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking, Deanna Zandt argues that using social media to share information and find community provides opportunities for not only paying attention to others, but also sharing in their stories. In contrast to Orenstein and Konrath et. al, Zandt claims that social media provides us with new ways in which to share our stories with each other, to build up trust and understanding, to individually and collectively become aware of other ways of living and thinking, and to expand our networks of connections. As a result, “we’re becoming more connected, and thus have the capacity to be more empathetic.” This empathy, she continues, “will lead us away from the isolation and resulting apathy that we’ve experienced as a culture” (40).

Zandt’s suggestion that social media could increase our capacity for empathy is evidenced in Jackson’s and Herold’s twitter projects. Both Jackson and Herold used twitter to spread awareness about people’s experiences with abortion and to provide twitter users with access to stories to which they may not have previously been exposed. Angie Jackson aimed to demystify the physical process of having an abortion for others and to let them know that it is not nearly as scary as she had imagined. And Steph Herold wanted to destigmatize abortion and create a space where people could share their stories and make visible how abortion is not the “sin of a few bad woman,” but “‘a regular part of women’s lives.’”

In both cases, tweeting about abortion was about spreading awareness and making those experiences visible that have been rendered invisible by mainstream media. It was about initiating conversations on a difficult and painful topic and enabling twitter users to have access to ideas, feelings, experiences and stories that they might not find in other online or offline spaces. It was about cultivating an awareness and a caring for these people and their experiences and providing a wide range of folks—those who have had abortions, those who haven’t, those who are opposed to abortion, those who only want to hear “certain” stories about having an abortion—a space to develop empathy and to share in the stories of those whose abortion experiences usually do not get heard and are devalued, dismissed and/or ignored. And, it was about providing a means for people who have had or were contemplating having an abortion to connect with and care for and provide support for each other. For all of these reasons, Jackson’s live-tweet and Herold’s #hashtag project made possible multiple expressions of empathy (and more) in caring about, caring for and caring with other twitter users.

1 In their discussion of the loss of empathy among college students, the authors merely speculate on possible causes. Without any studies to back them up, Konrath et. al can only suggest that an increase in social media might be connected to a loss of empathy. Peggy Orenstein is also careful to only suggest that there is a link. She writes: “researchers at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan found a drop in that trait, with the sharpest decline occurring since 2000. Social media may not have instigated that trend, but by encouraging self-promotion over self-awareness, they may well be accelerating it.”

Some notes from my podcast with room34

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For the past four weeks, STA and I have been doing a podcast called The Undisciplined Room. I’m really enjoying experimenting with podcasts; I’ve wanted to try them out for some time now. I know, I’m a little late to the party. Tons of people have been experimenting with podcasts for a long time now. I like doing research for the podcast and then having free-floating conversations about the topics. Well, maybe I like those parts too much. So far, our podcasts are each about 90 minutes. As STA and I discussed in yesterday’s podcast, we need to make them a little shorter. This means I need to stop bringing in so many topics and so many notes. Ha! Easier said than done. To ensure that our podcasts are not so long (too much trouble? too unruly? just too much?), I might post some of my notes and my thoughts here. I’m experimenting with that today by posting some of my notes, with a few additional thoughts, from yesterday’s podcast: Episode 4: I Always Have a Problem with Everything

APPLE’S LATEST ANNOUNCEMENT: iBooks Author + iBooks2 + iTunesU app
a. Apple and the Digital Textbook Counter-Revolution: is it revolutionary?
b. Reflections on the Apple Education Event
c. Apple introduces tools to someday supplant textbooks

If you don’t know what these apps/new Apple products are, check out the above links for an introduction. I’ve downloaded the iBooks Author app and experimented just a little with it. I have a few ideas about using it in relation to my trouble blog/research. At first, I was thinking of using it to create an introduction to the blog and to troublemaking. After talking with STA on the podcast, I have another project in mind too: A book (or a series of books?) on my queering feminist virtues, including troublemaking. I’ll need to think through what other virtues that I might want to add. In the past I’ve researched/written about courage and vigilance/persistence.

In preparation for our discussion, I wrote the following:
I don’t like textbooks: I’ve never used them for teaching. I was reminded of this when I read Hack Education’s post and her critique of textbooks as having students focus on secondary materials instead of primary ones. Maybe that’s helpful in science, but in the humanities, reading primary sources (and expanding what counts as and who is included as) is very important, especially for my own pedagogy. Can students handle primary sources? Trying to read these sources might make them uncomfortable in productive and/or valuable ways.

What interactive possibilities does it offer? Kathleen Fitzpatrick laments the lack of interactivity between readers or between author and reader; the interactivity is only between the individual user and the text. Here’s what she writes:

But there are some notable gaps here, as well. The textbooks that can be produced with iBooks Author and read in iBooks 2 are interactive, in the sense of an individual reader being able to work with an individual text in a hands-on fashion. They do not, however, provide for interaction amongst readers of the text, or for responses from a reader to reach the author, or, as far as I can tell so far, for connections across texts. The “book,” though multimediated, manipulable, and disembodied, is still a discrete, fairly closed object.

I think this is an important point. However, I wonder if that interactivity between readers and the reader and author is always necessary. What intimate (whatever that might mean) connections between a reader and a text get lost when we make everything social/interactive? Personally, even as much as I like twitter and blog comments (yes, I like blog comments), I don’t always want to know what others–even the author–think about a subject. I like to imagine my own possibilities. I am fighting back a digression about the creative process and problems with “groupthink” here. It’s hard to not talk about it, since it’s all over the interwubz these days (here and here and here).

In addition to the question of whether or not interactivity between readers is always a good thing, I like what tubbsjohn has to say about where that interactivity could/should take place in their comment on Fitzpatrick’s post:

Since the book is interactive, why not point the student out to an existing webservice such as a threaded discussion, a collaborative writing space, file uploads, photo sharing and others (behind your school’s authentication gates likely) that provide the sort activity you’d like the students to engage in. This way you can keep the ebook at the core the course but have diversions away from the book to activities that do it the way you’d like it. A simple thought but one that comes up in student responses to ereading: I want the book open AND my notebook or other activity open. This book/browser arrangement is just what the student is looking for.

I like their focus on both/and (the non-interactive/”closed” book AND other interactive options) and opposed to one or the other. As I write this, I also wonder about yet another option beyond either/or and both/and: How about getting rid of the book altogether? For my feminist debates class this past semester, I almost exclusively assigned blog posts.

Before moving on to a new, yet related, topic, I want to give a SHOUT-OUT to a “totally awesome blogger” that I just discovered: Hack Education This blogger/tech ed writer looks really cool. She has a master’s in women’s studies and wrote about political pranks. She calls herself a rabble-rouser and is ABD in comp lit. I’m excited/curious to check out her writings and to see how her women’s studies training and her rabble rousing influence her writing/reflections on tech ed. question How does feminist training influence one’s approaches to technology? Should one be explicit about their influences? If so, how? Questions about whether or not to claim one’s feminism (and how one might do that) come up a lot in my classes and I’m always interested in exploring how others grapple with them.

Stanford professor who taught AI class online to 160,000 students. Is this the future of education?
a. Tenured Professor Departs Stanford U, Hoping to Teach 500,000 Students at Online Start Up
b. Check out his video talk too.

In the Chronicle article, the professor writes:

I feel like there’s a red pill and a blue pill,” he said. “And you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I’ve taken the red pill, and I’ve seen Wonderland.

In my tweet about the quotation, I ask: What about a purple pill? Can we find ways to think about education technology within traditional academic spaces or without wholly rejecting traditional academic spaces? What is the role of traditional higher education? Should all courses be free? I will be pondering and struggling with these questions all year as I attempt to figure out my own role in relation to the academy. I see tremendous value in new technologies and moving outside of traditional (increasingly isolating and prohibitively expensive) academic spaces. Yet, I still see value in higher education; I loved my experiences as a student at a small liberal arts college and am not ready to give up on higher education altogether.

Okay, that’s some (yes, only some!) of my notes from yesterday’s podcast. I like continuing the conversation (well, at least continuing my engaging with the ideas) over here on my trouble blog. Maybe I’ll try it again next week.

Is grief a disorder?

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I ran across the following article in the New York Times this morning: Grief Could Join List of Disorders. In my quick glance at the article (and the link it provides to a study by Jerome C. Wakefield and Michael B. First), the controversy seems to be over whether or not to remove the bereavement exclusion (BE) in the fifth revision of the DSMV. If removed, grief could be treated as a disorder. In his co-authored study with First, Wakefield argues that the BE should be left in. I like what Wakefield writes (as cited in the NY Times article):

“An estimated 8 to 10 million people lose a loved one every year, and something like a third to a half of them suffer depressive symptoms for up to month afterward,” said Dr. Wakefield, author of “The Loss of Sadness.” “This would pathologize them for behavior previously thought to be normal.”

I must admit, I haven’t done much reading or research on Psychology/psychiatry and the DSMV or on (social) scientific studies of grief. Since I’m curious, maybe I should. I wonder, how do the studies discuss the experiences of grief that linger or reoccur even years after a loss? What are the dangers (such as pathologization) of understanding this to be a disorder? What are the benefits of treating it as disorder?

Here’s what I want to put BESIDE/S this study/article/issue:
1. Judith Butler and her theorizations of grief and critiques of the DSMV in Undoing Gender (particularly, ch 1: Beside Oneself and ch 4: Undiagnosing Gender)
2. My posts tagged with “grief” on this blog

What about a purple pill?

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Cool. But must we choose between a blue and a red pill? What about a purple pill?

Twitter Cares? Part Two: Twitter’s critics

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Here’s the second part of my essay on using twitter to care about/for/with people who’ve had abortions. Read the first part here.

Twitter’s many critics

Reactions were mixed, but the popular reception to Angie Jackson’s live-tweet and Step Herold’s #ihadanabortion hashtag was negative as critics branded these two uses of twitter as inappropriate and unproductive. Some critics claimed that tweeting personal stories about having an abortion trivializes the issue because twitter is not a space for users to have serious and meaningful reflections about their lives. Instead, it is a space for pointless babble, where users tweet about everything that they are doing, thinking, and eating right at the moment that it is happening and without any reflection on its value or whether or not they should share it with others. This “cult of immediacy,” generates information and stories that are ephemeral and function primarily as distractions that “go in one ear and out the other” (Keller).1

Other critics argued that twitter not only encourages users to tweet instead of reflect, but it produces an overabundance of timelines of tweets that are aimed more at entertaining and/or impressing others and less at connecting with them. In “Abortion by Pill in Real Time,” Politics Daily writer Helena Andrews argues that, “at its core, Twitter is a vehicle for self promotion,” one in which twitter users compete to be the latest pop cultural phenomenon and to appear on the “trending topics” list. Putting a painful and serious experience like abortion in this medium, she continues, encourages twitter readers to not take tweeting about abortion seriously and to read it only “as the latest ‘Isn’t this crazy?’ news item next to killer whales and the Winter Olympics.”

In addition to critiquing the ways in which twitter trivializes “serious” matters like abortion, many critics suggested that in using twitter to share their stories, users are offering up too much private information about themselves to the public. For these critics, tweeting about how abortion feels or when you had one goes beyond oversharing unimportant details about everyday life; it’s “inappropriate,” “crass,” “too blunt,” “distasteful,” and displays “bad manners.”2 These critiques reflected a more general dislike of twitter as a space that encourages people to blur the line between private and public and to reveal too much information about their lives, too often and too quickly. 

Finally, some critics argued that twitter was the wrong venue for developing meaningful connections between those who tweeted about their abortions and those who read and shared the tweets with others.3 Online message boards, website forums specifically for people who have had abortions, pamphlets, and books were all discussed as spaces that were more appropriate than twitter for publicly sharing stories. Using twitter to tweet about abortion, many claimed, could indicate to others that one either has too cavalier of an attitude about a serious issue or is deliberately attempting to provoke and outrage, as a publicity stunt, to make a political point, or just for the fun of shocking others. In either case, using twitter to spread awareness about people’s abortion stories will not change any perspectives about the issue and will not enable people to listen to, reflect on or connect over stories about people’s experiences with abortion.

1Bill Keller’s critique of twitter is not specifically about abortion, but it seems fitting to include it at this point. Do I need to rewrite this paragraph a little so as to clarify this point, or just put it in a endnote? Also, the “cult of immediacy” claim comes from another essay that isn’t explicitly concerned with tweeting about abortion. It’s from Evgeny Morozov’s essay, “Iran: Downside to the ‘Twitter Revolution’.” It was sometimes difficult to research and write this section because much of the criticisms of twitter and the medium for discussing abortion were over-generalized and assumed that everyone agreed with the idea that twitter was not for “serious” discussions. Of course, isn’t that how most popular reporting works? Anyway, as a result, I had to try to tease out the assumptions these critics were making by using the few scholarly and/or more thoughtful essays that I could find, none of which directly addressed the issue of twitter and abortion.

2 These attitudes about the crassness, bluntness were present in most of the mainstream reports on these two projects. The suggestion that tweeting about abortion was “bad manners,” comes from a comment on Salon’s “Tweeting your abortion”. While many of the comments refused to deal seriously with the issue of using twitter for discussing abortion and instead reduced it to another intractable debate about being pro-life vs. pro-choice, it was still interesting to read through the comments and to use them as sources for this essay.

3 In their dismissals of twitter as the wrong venue, most accounts fail to demonstrate an understanding of the unique features of twitter. Instead, twitter gets lumped in with other social media platforms, especially Facebook. In this essay, I am particularly interested in arguing that it is some of the unique features of twitter (which I discuss later in the essay) that make it particularly useful for practicing care/caring.

A new look!

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Notice something different? I’m in the process of re-designing my blog (just a little), thanks to STA and some awesome fonts from Chank. I’m using Dry Cowboy for headlines and Adrianna for text. Pretty sweet. I’m also hoping to revamp my about pages and add in some more teaching materials (finally) soon. So far, the new look is inspiring to make more trouble and have (even) more fun on this blog.

on developing good reading/ consuming/ engaging habits

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If you’ve spent some time reading through my blog, you know that I’m very interested in virtue ethics and the value of breaking some harmful habits (undisciplining ourselves) and cultivating other, helpful habits (like learning how to make and stay in trouble in ways that challenge or dismantle oppressive systems and practices). I’m not just interested in writing about virtue ethics on my blog, however. I’m also interested in exploring how writing/engaging on blogs can enable us to become more virtuous in general and how we might use virtue ethics to engage in blogging practices, approaches and attitudes that enable us to be more virtuous online. This latter goal of engaging in more effective, virtuous blogging practices involves thinking through how we blog and how we can develop habits that are more helpful (I’m particularly interested in habits that enable us to care–for others and for ourselves) and less harmful. What does this look like? Why are good habits important? Here’s one source that might provide some answers to these questions:

The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption I found out about this book via Brain Pickings (which I seem to be reading a lot lately). Check out this video for it:

Clay Johnson’s book looks intriguing; he’s interested in addressing how to deal with the increased amount of information we have access to in the era of online media and social networks by understanding it not as a problem of information overload, but one of unhealthy consumption habits. While I haven’t had a chance to spend much time thinking about his approach (or reading it; I downloaded a sample chapter to my iPad that I’ll hopefully look at tonight), I look forward to critically assessing it. I’m especially interested in exploring his suggestions for developing effective/helpful/healthy consumption habits online. One of his big focuses seems to be on thinking about healthy internet consumption habits in relation to healthy eating/dieting habits. I wonder, does he draw upon strategies employed by “the diet industry” and dieting/nutrition experts? What are the limits of this comparison?I should mention that while I appreciate the emphasis on health, I’m a little dubious about his approach. 

What I’d like to read beside The Information Diet:

Twitter Cares? Part One

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The following piece of writing was originally intended (and accepted) for an online journal. However, due to the limited page length and short time-frame for editing that was required, I decided to withdraw it from consideration and post it here instead, as an in-progress work. I’m planning to submit it for publication in an academic feminist journal in the future. Since it’s so long, I’m breaking it up into parts. Here’s part one, along with some notes that I may or may not try to incorporate into my longer version:

Twitter Cares? Using Twitter to Care About, Care For and Care With People Who Have Had Abortions

In February 2010, after finding out she was in the very early stages of an unwanted and potentially dangerous pregnancy, Angie Jackson decided to have an abortion using RU-486 and live-tweet about it. Her intention, as she announced it on twitter, her blog and a YouTube video, was to “demystify” abortion. Over the course of several weeks, she tweeted frequent updates about the physical and emotional effects of RU-486 in real time.

In November 2010, Steph Herold created a twitter hashtag, #ihadanabortion, and encouraged people to use it in their tweets in order to make visible their abortion stories and to link those stories together. Within days, #ihadanabortion was a trending topic on twitter, with more than 2,000 tweets using the hashtag, as people 1 “came out” with their accounts of having abortions. 2

Overwhelmingly, the criticisms of these twitter projects focused on tweeting about abortion as either a political or moral issue. Critics discussed how Jackson’s and #ihadanabortion tweets functioned and failed as political tools for the pro-choice movement, arguing that twitter could not be used to persuade people to rethink their stance on abortion and that pro-choice organizers, like Steph Herold, were doing more harm than good to the cause of abortion rights. Critics also discussed the impropriety of tweeting about such a private and controversial issue and claimed that tweeting about abortion, at best, displays “bad manners” and, at worst, demonstrates a shocking lack of moral beliefs and values. 3

What was missing from both political and moral critiques of tweeting about abortion was a discussion of ethics and ethical practices. What, if any, ethical practices did Angie Jackson and the twitter users who included Step Herold’s #ihadanabortion hashtag in their tweets engage in on twitter? And what ethical practices did they encourage in others? 4

In this essay, I argue that Jackson, Herold, and the individuals who marked their tweets with the #ihadanabortion hashtag, used twitter to practice empathy-as-care. Challenging the perception, fueled by newspaper reports, television news segments, popular accounts of scientific studies and academic articles, that twitter strips us of our empathy and makes us uncaring and apathetic, I explore how Angie Jackson’s live-tweet and Steph Herold’s hashtag enabled users to care about, care for and care with people who have had abortions. While the caring practices that these projects allowed for were tenuous, fleeting and not always successful, their presence on twitter indicates that social media like twitter have the potential to enable us to care and should be taken seriously as spaces with ethical value.

1 As is made clear later in the essay, I was partly inspired to write it because I’m increasingly frustrated by the dismissal of twitter as a soul-killing, unethical, amoral space of narcissistic superficiality and by the frequent conflation of twitter with other social media outlets, especially facebook. I’ve written about it on this blog before, like in more twitter hatin’ and conflatin’. Something else to note here is my title: I use people instead of women. See here for why.

2 I picked these two cases as a way to focus my article. In many ways, they are very dated. It’s difficult to write an academic article that can keep up with the rapid pace of social media. Part of this has to do with how ephemeral twitter is (which, although a drawback, is part of its value too). Case in point: I had a lot of trouble tracking down the actual tweets for this article; I had to rely on blog posts that describe the twitter projects and/or archived the actual tweets. Part of the problem of keeping up also has to do with how slow academic publishing is. By the time an article is published, it’s findings can be quite outdated. 

3 It was fun (but also a little disturbing) to do research for this article. For my analysis of the actual projects, I spent all of my time online, scrolling through online articles from mainstream traditional media outlets (like ABC or FOX);  popular “alternative” sources, like The Nation, Salon, Alternet; and feminist sites like Jezebel, feministing, abortiongang, and the frisky. I also spent a lot of time reading the comments; some were great, but many prevented meaningful dialogue by reducing any discussion of abortion to: are you for it or against it? For my more general “academic” research on the ethical value of twitter, I was struck by how few sources there were. Okay, that doesn’t seem too surprising; twitter isn’t that old. One of the few sources that I did find was supposedly about twitter, but spent more time focusing on social media in general and facebook in particular. This source, and others like it, failed to give enough attention to the specific features of twitter that make it particularly useful/not useful. 

4 In my first draft of this paper, which had a word count limit of only 3,000 words or about 10 pages–yikes!, I didn’t have enough space to discuss my own vision of the differences between the political, the moral and the ethical. In my more extended version of this essay, I want to address this distinction (at least) a little more. Maybe I could put it in a footnote? Here’s one preliminary way I’m thinking about it: while politics is about developing projects that advocate for a particular vision/goal (e.g.: keeping abortion legal, making it more accessible) and morality is about reflecting on the goodness/badness of actions (e.g.: abortion is wrong), ethics is concerned with certain practices that enable individuals to express empathy and care about/for others without judgment and regardless of their political and/or moral beliefs. 

tweeting your thesis? good. rethinking purpose of thesis? better.

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Last week, some grad students at UCL’s Centre for Digital Humanities wanted to use twitter’s 140-character limit for learning how to concisely articulate and share one’s thesis statement/topic. So they created and started using the hashtag #tweetyourthesis. I was really excited to see this use of twitter; I developed some twitter assignments this semester for my students with the same goal–getting them to practice being concise–in mind. Two days after they first started using it (jan 11, 2012), Wired Campus at the Chronicle asked: You Can Tweet Your Thesis, But Should You?

According to this article, the hashtag has generated some online debate, sparked partly by a question posed early on in the use of #tweetyourthesis:

What does it mean if a student can condense an idea for such a long project into 140 characters?

My immediate response to this question is: what does it mean if a student CAN’T condense an idea of such a long project into 140 characters? And another question: What’s the purpose of our ideas if we can’t communicate them in succinct, compelling ways? Just like the original tweeted question (twestion? tweequery?), my two follow-ups are leading questions; they aren’t really questions intended to open up a discussion about how we should/shouldn’t use twitter in our academic work. Instead, they are posed with an understood response–What does it mean if a student can condense an idea in 140 characters? Implied response: Their thesis isn’t complex, rigorous, demanding, in-depth (fancy) enough. The counter–What does it mean if a student can’t condense? The implied response: Their thesis is too complex, too jargony, too esoteric.

Either way you ask it, critical debates/conversations get hung up on questions of how best to develop and communicate a thesis and whether or not to use twitter in that process. While these are still important questions (and while I’m happy to have any conversations that take twitter seriously as medium of thoughtful and meaningful expression), they are not the questions that I want to pose and critically and creatively explore about graduate theses and online technologies like twitter (or blogs) right now. Why discuss whether or not twitter should be used? It is being used in productive, interesting and empowering ways. They are not questions that get at deeper concerns about how graduate departments can and should rethink the purpose and requirements of the thesis in light of the job market, the ridiculously long time that it takes to earn a doctorate (on average, 9 years), and the shifting ways and locations in which academic publishing is happening.

On January 9th, InsideHigherEd’s Scott Jaschik wrote about recent conversations/debates at the annual MLA convention concerning the future of the dissertation in their post, Dissing the Dissertation? Much (but not all) of the discussion focused on if and how to respond to recent online technologies and their impact on how academics write, communicate and publish. Here are a few key passages:

1. on writing on the web as more than making PDFs of your articles
“Miller, of Rutgers, stressed that opening up students to digital work was a responsibility for humanities departments, given the way people increasingly communicate information. Graduate students need to learn “what it means to write for the web, with the web,” which is not the same thing, he said, “as making PDFs of your [print] articles.”

2. on rethinking scholarship and the “life of the mind”
“Whether departments want it to happen or not, the form of scholarship is going to change, he said. Rather than avoiding that, scholars should consider the ramifications, he said, by redesigning dissertations. “Once you lose the monograph, what’s the future of the long argument?” he asked. “What is the life of the mind is going to look like when it’s no longer stored on the page?” The answers will become clear when those about to become professors or public intellectuals are set free from the traditional dissertation, he said, and are encouraged to produce digital works.”

3. on learning new ways to read and to mentor
[Kathleen Fitzpatrick] ”It should be our jobs to support new kinds of work,” she said. And for faculty members trained before the digital era, she said that means a responsibility to “learn how to read in new formats,” not just to look for linear arguments over hundreds of pages.

So true! It seems as if many writers/scholars fail to understand that writing online is much more than just putting something that you have written online; it requires developing new ways of connecting, collaborating, understanding, reflecting and communicating! Students AND faculty need to develop skills/ways of thinking and engaging and writing that the new online media demand. How can students be prepared for writing, researching and teaching in the 21st century without these important skills? They can’t.

Note: Fitzpatrick is the Director of Scholarly Communications for MLA and is doing some really amazing stuff with e-publishing and using online technologies to shape scholarly work. Check out her blog, Planned Obsolescence, and her MLA address: Networking the Field. No, really, read her awesome address! Here are a few great bits from it:

1. on the need to recognize online writing as writing and figure out how to put online forms to work for us
“I would argue that the challenge we face today in our encounter with the digital future of our fields does not come from a media culture, or a student population, that refuses writing; instead, it lies in the need to recognize that the forms of writing that engage so many todayare writing, and to figure out how to put those forms to work for us, rather than dismissing them as inherently frivolous and degraded.”

2. on how new forms can make us (teachers/students) better writers and communicators
“This is a challenge that many faculty today are meeting in their classrooms, by experimenting with individual and group blogs, with Twitter, and with other forms of social, networked communication, often to great effect. These modes of engagement with online writing often work, in to give students a sense of audience, of writing as an act of communication and critical exchange, that far exceeds that produced by the research paper; online, their words are subject not just to the scrutiny of a single evaluator, but to that of a broader group of readers engaged in thinking about the same questions. However formal or informal the location of the writing may appear to us in comparison with the properly MLA-formatted research paper, the act of communicating on an ongoing basis with a broader audience – practicing over and over the art of staking out a position, presenting evidence, engaging with counter-arguments – or frankly, even just the art of being interesting and amusing – can only help produce better writers, and clearer thinkers, in any venue.”

3. on needing to understand these forms and take them seriously
“This seems obvious enough. But the need to understand these new, networked, often less-than-formal modes of writing as writing applies equally to us and our own work. The horror that greets the idea of taking a blog seriously as a locus of scholarly writing – or even more, the idea of taking Twitter seriously as a form of scholarly communication – reveals a serious misunderstanding of the nature of those forms: what they are, and what can be done with them.”

4. on how scholars are already using twitter for engaging and connecting
“The standard dismissal of Twitter as a scholarly tool suggests that no serious argument can be made in 140 characters, and there’s of course a real truth to that. But that dismissal betrays a failure to engage with the ways that scholars actually use Twitter today, and the things that can be done in those 140 characters: scholars share links to longer pieces of writing; engage in complex conversations in real time, with many colleagues, over multiple tweets; and more than anything, perhaps, they build a sense of community. This community is ready with congratulations and sympathy, and is eager to share jokes and memes, but it’s also ready to debate, to discuss, to disagree. More than anything, it’s ready to read – it’s not just a community of friends but a community of scholars, an audience for the longer work in which its members are engaged.”

So, to wrap this entry (which was originally intended to be a brief discussion and archiving of the discussion about #tweetyourthesis), I thought I’d offer up my own twitter-worthy–it’s 58 characters!–thesis for this post (and a succinct summary of my thoughts on the topic): Tweeting your thesis? Good. Rethinking the purpose/requirements of thesis? Better.

sources:

on procrastination

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Right now I need to be finishing up another non-blog writing project. It has a non-negotiable and pretty urgent deadline. So, what have I been doing today instead? Yep, writing several blog posts and avoiding, at all costs, what I’m actually supposed to be doing. Sadly, even as I recognize my acts of avoidance, I can find ways to justify them. Like: One purpose of this blog (and my twitter feed) is to document the writing process. That includes the painful non-writing, procrastinating parts. I need to archive those experiences for future reference! Ha!

Here’s what I just tweeted:

To save time, I just took a screen shot of the four tweets. Here’s a link to the New Yorker article on procrastination.

Word count: 122 words