Guest Post: The Challenges of Live-Tweeting
by Victoria Yang
My introduction to live-tweeting occurred in 2013, when I was invited to my very first conference as a teenager. Although this was six years ago, I still remember that the email invitation prominently featured one question: what’s your Twitter handle? Delegates were encouraged to maintain an active social media presence during the course of the conference, and I remember the exhilarating feeling of live-tweeting sessions and participating in discussion extending far beyond the confines of the conference centre. Social media has become a prominent fixture in the academic world, and it is now commonplace for conferences to actively promote a conference hashtag. While there are many noted benefits to live-tweeting conferences, from networking to promoting research, it is also important to take a critical approach to how this practice has affected how academics present themselves and engage with each other. This blog post will address two dimensions of this: conference organization and context collapse.
The 2009 Web 2.0 Expo debacle encapsulates how improperly integrating live-tweeting into conferences can be divisive instead of inclusive and participatory. During this event, media scholar danah boyd’s talk was punctuated by random laughs and outbursts from the audience: “The sounds were completely irrelevant to what I was saying and I was devastated.” After she left the stage, boyd learned that the cause of the laughter was the livestream of tweets projected behind her – people had been criticizing her for speaking too quickly. This is a demonstration of how conference organizers enabled the ‘digital backchannel’ of the conference – the secondary, typically informal communication network of Twitter – to clash with the ‘front channel’ – boyd’s formal presentation, in a public and humiliating way. Thus, while live-tweeting can create a space for rich, participatory discourse, it can also be disruptive and cause harm: “Because of the decision to provide random attendees with space equal to a presenter’s, Twitter users got to bully boyd in real time.”
Another issue that live-tweeting gives rise to is that of context collapse, a phenomenon wherein “networks can collapse diverse, usually-separated aspects of identity such as familial, social, and professional connections into common audiences.” The rise of ‘academic Twitter’ complicates the separation between the ‘personal’ and ‘professional.’ For me, live-tweeting conferences made transparent the stark contrast between the casual vulnerability that characterized my ‘personal’ tweets and the professional persona I attempted to adopt. This dichotomy is captured in a study of ‘academic Twitter’ by Bonnie Stewart, who notes that “Institutional concepts of professionalism and academic identity tend to exclude oral registers and hyper-personal communications.” Some academics – particularly those who also consider themselves activists – have faced repercussions from their institutions for tweets deemed controversial and unprofessional. Thus, for an academic tweeting or live-tweeting, the context collapse phenomenon can present a challenge as they negotiate their personal and professional identities online.
Through conference organization and context collapse, we can see some of the complexities that arise with live-tweeting. Despite this, there are important benefits: for instance, researcher Glen Wright describes Twitter as “a virtual water cooler, a place where academics go to build community, have some fun, and let off steam.” PhD candidate Ben Labe further draws attention to the utility of a professional online presence, even amidst possible controversy: “Because the job market for academics is so abysmal, aspiring researchers now endeavor to ‘brand’ and ‘sell’ themselves in the marketplace of ideas.” Live-tweeting is a relatively recent development in academic life, and the standards and norms are still being established. Nevertheless, understanding its negative potential can help us negotiate our behaviour and proceed in a more positive way.
References
Berlatsky, Noah. “The Dangers of Tweeting at Conferences.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 15, 2017.
boyd, danah. “Spectacle at Web2.0 Expo… from My Perspective.” November 24th, 2009. Apophenia (blog). Accessed October 29, 2019.
Oliver Bateman. “The Young Academic’s Twitter Conundrum.” The Atlantic, May 10, 2017.
Ross, C., M. Terras, C. Warwick, and A. Welsh. “Enabled Backchannel: Conference Twitter Use by Digital Humanists.” Journal of Documentation. 67 (March 8, 2011): 214–37.
Stewart, Bonnie. “Collapsed Publics: Orality, Literacy, and Vulnerability in Academic Twitter.” Journal of Applied Social Theory 1, no. 1 (2016): 61–86.
Wright, Glen. “The Weird and Wonderful World of Academic Twitter.” Times Higher Education (THE), September 2, 2015.
Featured Image: Smartphone Twitter Mobile Phone from edar used under Pixabay License.
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