Recently, I’ve had to come to grips with the fact that I’ve quite likely peaked. The paper that I was supposed to read at the 2009 Modern Language Association’s convention went viral.
When I chose at the last minute not to attend the conference, given my lack of job interviews, insufficient travel funds, and the low salary of a visiting professor, I rewrote the paper that I had planned to present at a panel on “Today’s Students, Today’s Teachers: Economics” to talk about “The Absent Presence” of people who, like me, could not afford to attend conferences. I sent it to the panel chair to read on my behalf, posted it to my blog, and mentioned on Twitter that I had done so. The result was shocking. Within 24 hours, some 2,000 people had read my paper, spurred in no small part by an article in The Chronicle by Jennifer Howard, a blog post by the anonymous academic blogger Bitch Ph.D., and countless mentions on Twitter and other blogs. By the end of the convention, my blog had received over 7,000 page views.
The scope of going viral became more apparent when I returned to campus a week later, for the start of the semester, to discover that every colleague I ran into had read the piece. Instead of being heard by a small group of people who attended the panel at which I was to speak, my paper had been read by more people—and colleagues!—than I could ever reasonably expect to read any article or book that I might write in the future. So there it is: I’ve had my 15 minutes.
It’s a compelling narrative: A “virtual nobody,” as Bitch Ph.D. put it, comes out of nowhere, takes one of the biggest academic conferences by storm, and gets noticed by thousands. He rides off triumphantly into the sunset and even gets to write a follow-up for The Chronicle. But if there’s one thing that I learned in graduate school, it’s that every narrative can (and probably should, if you’re looking to get published) get deconstructed. On reflection, it seems to me worthwhile to explore one thing that was said about my paper and one thing that was repeatedly said to me about my paper.
First is the suggestion that my paper was, as The Chronicle put it, possibly the “most-talked-about presentation” at the conference. But let’s be honest: The number of people talking about my paper in Philadelphia could only have been very small. After all, the chair informs me that there were approximately 35 people who attended the panel. Far more people certainly attended Catherine Porter’s presidential address and discussed her call to reconsider the importance of translations and those who create them. My paper could not have been anything more than a blip on the conversational radar. It seems certain that practically no one at the real MLA was talking about my paper. How could they have? They hadn’t heard it.
Instead, my paper and the response it generated happened at a virtual MLA. I’m not talking about a conference taking place in Second Life, but rather the real-time supplement to the physical conference that was conducted via social-media tools. The crowd presenting at the virtual MLA was considerably smaller than the approximately 7,400 scholars who came to Philadelphia. For example, Amanda French—recently an assistant research scholar at New York University—estimated that only 256 people used Twitter with the official #mla09 hashtag, based on data from the tweet-storage service TwapperKeeper. And while it’s nearly impossible to tell how many people blogged about the MLA, one can reasonably assume that they were fewer than those using Twitter, since participation on Twitter takes less time than blogging.
But if the number of those participating in the virtual MLA was so much smaller, how did so many people read my paper? The difference is that it is only the number of people presenting at the virtual MLA that is small; the audience is much, much larger. The virtual MLA requires no registration fee or travel, and when you lower those bars via social media, anyone can attend. That includes not only people like me, who couldn’t afford the real MLA, but also scholars from outside the field of literary studies. My Web site’s views really started spiking when my paper was tweeted by two historians: Dan Cohen, director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, and Jo Guldi, a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. But it’s not only people without funds to travel or academics outside the field who attend the virtual MLA. It really can be anyone. Curious onlookers who might want to know what exactly it is that literature professors do can suddenly find out. And it is that group that caused my paper to go viral.
The virtual MLA suggests a few things about humanities scholarship in the 21st century.
First, scholarship will be freely accessible online. Online scholarship not only is the next logical step for publication but also presents a way to address an expanding audience. The much-discussed crisis in the humanities has at its origin the question of what—if anything—the humanities are good for. It has been difficult to answer that question, in part because our scholarship is frequently inaccessible, published in small journals or contained in subscription-only databases. Making our work freely accessible—whether in open-access journals or on our own Web sites—means that more people will be able to see what we are doing. And while I’m not naïve enough to think that access alone will make people see why the study of film or history matters, it seems certain that, as David Parry—an assistant professor of emerging media and communications at the University of Texas at Dallas—recently put it, humanities scholars must “be online or be irrelevant.”
Second, scholarship in the age of the virtual MLA will become increasingly collaborative and participatory. We all know that collaboration in the humanities is made difficult by institutional pressures associated with tenure and promotion. Moving scholarship online lowers some other, practical barriers to collaboration. Moreover, cooperation will not only be with our colleagues down the hall. We need to be ready to work with knowledgeable hobbyists (aka independent scholars) and to share credit with those partners. We may find that the focus of our work shifts a bit in response to engagement with people outside academe. And, again, we may find that what we as humanities scholars do will be better understood and valued.
But let me extract myself from the unlikely role of futurist and now focus on what was said to me in the days following my paper’s going viral. In blog comments, on Twitter, via e-mail messages, and even in real life, people repeatedly told me that they hoped the exposure I was receiving would lead to some new career opportunities for me. I naturally appreciated such wishes and must confess to having thought something similar myself. But upon further reflection, I think that such hopes—mine included—miss the point of my paper.
What caught people’s attention was not so much my personal experience but rather how it reflected that of an ever-increasing portion of today’s faculty members. And while I would certainly like to have more-secure employment, the conversion of just one person from contingent faculty to the tenure track will not change any of the conditions that prevented me and other members of the new faculty majority from attending the real MLA. Naturally, almost everyone who wished me well would have expressed similar thoughts to the rest of the nation’s non-tenure-track faculty members had they the venue to do so. I found myself wondering, then, if my paper really had put me in the position of an Everyman, as The Chronicle suggested. Were the calls for someone to do something for Brian Croxall reflective of a faint hope that saving Everyman could result in saving the entire profession?
As wonderful as it would be for the wasteland of academic career opportunities to be saved by the revivification of some Eliotic Adjunct King, it just can’t work that way. The problems of contingent academic labor are systemic and perhaps cannot be adequately addressed by a single department or even a university, let alone the blogosphere.
But one solution is to make sure that those who are applying to graduate school know very, very clearly what they are getting into. No one at my undergraduate alma mater told me in 2001 about the realities of the job market, and it certainly wasn’t in the interest of the university that accepted me for graduate study to do so. If we humanists want to be humane, we ought to level with our undergraduates.
By chance, I just received an e-mail message from someone who attended my college and is interviewing as a candidate in my graduate department. She wanted to know what she could do to prepare. What did I do? I answered her questions as best I could. I also pointed her to several articles by Thomas H. Benton in The Chronicle that outline the risks of graduate school in the humanities. And I mentioned a paper by Brian Croxall. That guy may have peaked, but he made a good point.
