Submitted by John Jones on Jan 05, 2009, 07:30 PM
One drawback of any academic conference is the constant feeling that you are missing something. Typically, multiple panels are scheduled at the same time, and it can be difficult to know what knowledge is being produced and exchanged in sessions you are unable to attend. Last week's MLA conference, where I was on a panel on microblogging with Brian Croxall, Matt Gold, and David Parry, was no exception. Because of the quality of the discussion session following our presentations, however, we wanted to take a step toward rectifying this situation. We decided that we would do our best to provide the details of our talks and discussion--as well as the subsequent blogged conversations that have arisen out of the panel--for those who weren't there. Since the event was initiated and then organized using different social and collaborative media (Twitter, Skype, Pageflakes, etc.), we created a Google Doc of our notes and the following conversation. If you were able to attend the panel and would like to edit and update the document to cover something that we missed, please email the panel chair, Brian Croxall at b.croxall [at] gmail [dot] com, and he will be glad to give you editing privileges on the Google Doc on which this post is based. Otherwise, please feel free to continue the discussion in the comments section below. What follows is our best attempt at a recreation of the panel based on our recollection and notes. Update: Cathy Davidson blogged about the panel on HASTAC a few days ago. Here's a link to her post.

Overview:

This panel was organized somewhat differently then the traditional MLA panels. That is, rather than follow the typical format in which three presenters read a paper for 20 minutes each, followed by a Q&A session of about 15 minutes, this panel constrained the initial presentation times. Each of the three panelists tried to limit their presentations to five minutes, ending their respective presentations with a series of questions rather than conclusions, leaving much more time for discussion. This was done not only in an effort to foster more discussion, but also in an effort to have the form of the session mimic the object of inquiry: microblogging. If Twitter and other such services were all about conversation, we reasoned, the panel itself should focus on generating that conversation.

Panelists:

Brian Croxall, Emory University (Chair) John Jones, University of Texas, Austin Matt Gold, New York City College of Technology, CUNY David Parry, University of Texas, Dallas

Presentations:

Brian Croxall introduced the general concept of microblogging to the audience--describing it as a cross-platform, read/write networked experience--and outlined a few key terms related to the discussions that would follow. In addition to explaining the unusual format of the panel, Brian also invited the audience to use two hashtags to write about the conference on Twitter: #MLA08 for general MLA microblogging and #MLA140 for tweets about this specific panel, both of which had been used to compile the pre-convention page for the panel. (Brian's Presentation slides are available at SlideRocket.) Next, John Jones examined Twitter through the work of compositionist Fred Kemp, arguing that microblogging creates new kinds of aggregated texts that must be understood as collective entities rather than in their individual pieces. Thus, any one "tweet" may not make sense outside of the larger discourse, that is, the larger collective environment, in which that tweet was made. The various ways in which individual tweets can be aggregated, however, destabilize those collective environments since information can be arranged and rearranged in many different ways. John argued that this leads at least two conclusions. First, debates over the value of internet communication services like blogs, Facebook, or Twitter can be usefully viewed as debates over how to value the texts these services generate and what constitutes the boundaries of those texts. Kemp states: "The value of written conversations ? lies in the organic and open-ended nature of knowledge making they display, not in their transmitted factual increments, which are usually, and crudely, termed information" (187, orig. emphasis). When critics attack the worth of Twitter, they are, more often then not, focusing on the "transmitted factual increments,"?that is, singular tweets?rather than examining the non-traditional texts created by these individual tweets. Second, what we need to consider is not just the individual pieces of information served by Twitter, but rather the various texts that these pieces can be aggregated into. The first way is to gather these texts into a traditional product of print culture. One example of a service that has assembled a useful, traditional text out of many aggregate contributions is Wikipedia. While the structure of Wikipedia is designed to efface individual contributions, the site is built on the back of an aggregative text. Another way would be to create new texts. One example of these texts would be purposeful aggregations created on the fly to serve the specific needs of a particular audience. These texts may not be permanent, in that it may disappear once it is no longer needed. Examples include the Google Maps / Twitter mashup or politweets.com. Interestingly, both of these sites are now defunct: having served their purpose, these texts are no longer in use. With aggregations like these, Twitter has allowed for texts that defy the traditional spatial and authorial boundaries we associate with the word "text." What remains for language scholars is how we will begin to interact with these self-constructed texts and the kinds of thinking that they will generate. If we wish to truly understand new services like Twitter, we need to pay greater attention to these new texts. As investigators of language, we need to begin to think about the literary / cultural importance of these texts and how they can be productively analyzed. It is likely that we will need to develop new literary tools to deal with these texts, as older methods of analysis--which often presume a unitary textual product--will likely be unable to deal with their unique properties. Matthew K. Gold presented next, arguing that critics of Twitter have failed to appreciate the rhetorical nuances of the networked discursive spaces created by microblogs. When the networked environment of Twitter is fully considered, Twitter can be seen not as a proving ground for narcissistic individualism, but rather as a space in which new forms of distributed collectivity have flourished. Critics who have argued that text-speak has resulted in a deterioration of language skills have failed to see that many of the features identified as unique to the texting or microblogging formats--such as initialisms, abbreviated words, pictographs, and logographs--have long histories within English language and literature. So, what is new about Twitter? According to Matt, it enables new forms of networked collectivity, new forms of ambient intimacy, new forms of performative identity, new kinds of networked literary performances, and new ways to "push" information to distributed audiences. Two concerns we should worry about: (1) What is twitter doing to our sense of time? How do we experience time differently when, as Jean Baudrillard noted, "the instantaneity of communication has miniaturized our exchanges into a succession of instants"? (2) Tim O'Reilly and Ian Bogost have pointed to a problematic issue: Twitter is, at root, a database, and we are happily populating it with all kinds of information, giving little thought to the uses to which that information might be put in the future. Ian Bogost has suggested that in Web 2.0 environments, individuals are converted into "users" who are manufacturing products that will later be sold to large corporations for billions of dollars. To what extent are users of Twitter complicit in manufacturing their own chains? (Matt's presentation slides.) The final panelist was David Parry, who argued that, like blogging, microblogging has made a transition from being initially viewed as a tool of personal expression ("LiveJournal" or "Open Diary") to a valuable and influential space of political discourse. If 2006 was the year of the political blog (with blogs influencing several key races) 2008 was perhaps the year of Twitter, where tweeting became a primary means for tracking political discourse. The real value in Twitter though lies not in the massive followers whom Obama collected (150,000+) but rather the larger conversation, the collection of tweets from individuals who have only a few dozen followers. In this way Twitter represents a way to sample the collective conscious, or what David called "swarm conscious." In this regard Twitter is neither blogging (it is more a collectively authored text) nor micro (it represents something much longer than the 140 characters of individual tweets). Twitter represents just one, albeit the most prominent, instance of what Mark Pesce has called "Hyperpolitics," politics in a hyperconnected world. David ended his talk with three questions: 1. Does this mean the death, or at least decline of local politics (e.g. how long can something like the electoral college survive)? 2. What happens to a representative democracy when politicians can tweet and be tweeted to directly from the House floor, Senate Floor, or executive offices? 3. Lest we think this is all positive, a growth in democracy, how long until we have the first Twitter mob? (Slides, which David claims make little sense outside of the audio which accompanied them.)

Discussion:

-Alex Reid: (@digtaldigs): Do we treat microblogs as an add-on or do they require us to rethink the composition of conventional texts? -Alex Reid: Is Twitter spiky or flat? -Jill Walker Retteberg (of jill/txt) asked how this differed from other social networking sites such as Faceboook. David responded that it was different in two important ways: 1. It is mobile, you carry it in your pocket, adding to the sense of immediacy and locative based communication. 2. The short nature of the posts allow them to be aggregated, and thus produce a stream, a snapshot of what people are thinking at a given moment, in a way that Facebook or MySpace does not. -A member of the audience offered that one of the important features of Twitter is its asymmetrical nature. That is, that some people follow lots but are only followed by few, some follow few but are followed by lots, and groups of followers never completely overlap. -Amanda French (@amandafrench) How does the aggregated texture of Twitter differ from the imaginative texture of a novel? Is the novel still relevant now? How do services like Twitter affect literature? Matt: We don't know what the answer to the last part of the question will be. Think back to the early modernists, who translated the social fragmentation after WWI into a shattered, stream-of-consciousness literary style. Will the stylistic distinctiveness of Twitter (more direct language, constrained as it is by space; networked communication, aggregated consciousness) similarly have an effect on novels? Since so many tweets are episodic and serial in nature, coming as they do in short installments, will we see a return to serialized narrative more generally? Very hard to say what the effect will be, but it seems certain that there will be some effect. Matt also gestured toward the popularity of SMS novels in Japan and elsewhere as a model for how narrative structures are being altered by new distribution media. -David offered that academics are focused on analyzing or parsing language that is meant to be heard--writing for an audience--but haven't really figured out or need to develop new tools for analyzing writing that is "writing to be overheard." -There was a lot of discussion about the term "mob" and whether or not that applied to these social media technologies. David explained that often in work about social technology (e.g. Rheingold's Smart Mobs) there is a tendency to treat the technology as that which makes the mob smart, as in tech + mob = smart mob, but this is not always the case, indeed can often be tech + mob =dangerous mob. But he agreed that mob was probably not the right term for analyzing these group phenomena, as the term mob really focuses too heavily on a collection of individuals. Perhaps we need something more like Hardt and Negri's "multitude," but clearly there is a different ontology in play here that requires some new/different thinking. -A significant part of the end conversation was centered around making students aware of these services not only their existence but how they operate, i.e. developing a pedagogy which fosters a social media literacy. For instance, who controls this massive amount of data being produced? and how does/should that affect how we use these technologies? There is a lot of "work" that goes into twittering, and how/who benefits from this work is not always transparent. Jamie Skye Blanco (@spikenlilli) argued that the key is to teach students to move beyond being users, into being network creators. While the panelists were supportive of the idea of having students as network or tool creators, they questioned whether the same benefits would be available if the tool created was used by only a small circle of friends. -Matt noted that one of the larger, unsettling backdrops to the discussion of what happens to information posted on Twitter is the new level of surveillance and data mining that the U.S. government is now performing without judicial review. How this will play out with respect to Twitter and similar microblogging networks remains to be seen. -The final comment came from Sybil Vane (of Bitch Ph.D., @SybilV) who noted the irony of criticism about Twitter that it fueled narcissism. Instead, she commented that the rigorous brevity of the medium as well as the panel opened the possibility for more conversation than typically happens during MLA sessions. As such, she suggested that similar "navel-gazing" at the MLA would be very welcome indeed!

Post-Conference Session-Related Blog Posts:

If you are looking for blog posts about this panel from other attendees, etc. check out:

• Davidson, Cathy. "Digital Media and Learning Plus Twitter at MLA, Part I," The Cat in the Stack 2 January 2009.
• Gold, Matthew K. "MLA 2008 Recap: Part 1 - The Rise of the Digital MLA" 3 January 2009.
• Howard, Jennifer. "MLA 2008: The Last Roundup," The Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog 31 December 2008.
• McLemee, Scott. "MLA Goes Tweet," Inside Higher Education 29 December 2008.
• Reid, Alex. "Being on Time: Kairotic Microblogging," Digital Digs 28 December 2008.
• Tryon, Chuck. "More Syllabus Scramble," The Chutry Experiment 2 January 2009.

Other Stuff:

Abstract (from convention program): While blogging as a form of communication has continued to grow at an astounding pace and to gain social credence, the past year has seen the development of a new, marginal form of networked communication, microblogging. Critics of blogs and other forms of internet communication often criticize its short form, reactionary nature, and favoring of terse witty statements over long sustained analysis. Microblogging would seem to carry these problems to the extreme. Usually composed of 140 characters or less, able to be transmitted and received not only via computer, but equally as well on a cellphone, microblogging posts amplify the always connected, ubiquitously wired, seemingly endless stream of noise that comprises much of the internet's discourse. Indeed, in one regard this practice of microblogging embodies all that we might critique in digital networked communication: increasingly short communication coupled with increasingly solipsistic utterances. Yet microblogging's development in some unforeseen ways has also thrown into question the limitations and possibilities of digital discourse, potentially opening or reinvigorating exactly what "digital discourse" means and will come to mean.

Organization/Planning:

This panel was organized, or at least initially so, via a tweet. That is, rather than a standard CFP, panelists were recruited via twitter. You can see the original post here.

References:

John:

• Kemp, F. (1995). "Writing Dialogically: Bold Lessons from Electronic Text." In J. Petraglia (Ed.), Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction (pp. 179?194). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Matt:

• Baudrillard, Jean. "The Ecstasy of Communication" in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster. Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1983.
• Bauerlein, Mark. ?Teen Narcissism.? Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind. Chronicle of Higher Education. 18 December 2008.
• Bogost, Ian. ?Bloomsday on Twitter.? Ian Bogost. 7 July 2007.
• Bolter, Jay David. Writing Spaces, 2nd ed. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001.
• Crystal, David. txtng: the gr8 db8. Oxford: 0xford U.P., 2008.
• Ferguson, Andrew. ?Twits on Parade.? The Weekly Standard, 20 October 2008.
• O'Reilly, Tim. "Why I Love Twitter." O'Reilly Radar (11/29/08).
• Otterman, Sharon. "Haste, Scorned: Blogging at a Snail?s Pace." New York Times 21 November 2008.
• "State of the Twittersphere - Q4 2008 Report." Hubspot. 22 December 2008.
• Thompson, Clive. "Brave New World of Digital Intimacy." New York Times, 9/5/08.
• __. "How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense." Wired, 6/26/07.

David:

• Carr, Nicholas. "Twitter dot dash." Rough Type. March 18, 2007.
• Hartley, John. "The Frequencies of Public Writing: Tomb, Tome, and Time as Technologies of the Public." in Democracy and New Media, ed. Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 247-270.
• Pesce, Mark. "Hyperpolitics (American Style)." The Human Network. June 25, 2008.