In an early entry in the theory of Twitter, a 2012 editors’ letter in n+1 suggested that the platform was reviving the art of the epigram. But epigrams are hard, which is why Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker were geniuses; how much of the trouble lesser writers get themselves into on Twitter is a result of inartful compression? And even if you’re good at them — especially if you’re good at them — what does speaking entirely in epigrams do to your psyche? As Katie Kadue put it in another n+1 essay, this one from last year, “All social media both feeds and feeds on narcissism, but Twitter’s capacity to mirror the world and its users’ neuroses in discrete verbal and visual units … elevates self-regard to a formal principle. We compulsively iterate ourselves … as if hoping we’ll eventually perfect the reflection.”
Kadue’s essay is one of the best of a burgeoning literature grasping for a handle on the psychosocial and institutional consequences of this no-longer-new platform. In our own pages, the philosopher Justin E.H. Smith argued in 2019 that “the inane fashions and unreflective group-think that reign in Anglophone academia are driven by what happens online"; that judgment was echoed by Joseph M. Keegin, who recently polemicized against “the professors of ‘academic Twitter,’” who risk “yoking their reputations to the delirious churn of outrage media.”
When I talk with friends in the academy about Twitter, they tend to fall into two camps. Some agree with Keegin that Twitter is having fairly direct effects on the culture of academe “in real life” — in conference programs, book proposals, the topics of special journal issues, and so on. Others insist that the wall between the two is much sturdier than it sometimes looks, and that what happens online has very little to do with what happens in the field. Anecdotally, scholars under 40 are more likely to be in the former camp; those over it in the latter.
Essays like Kadue’s, Keegin’s, and Smith’s are first drafts of an important project, early articulations of the repercussions of a profound media shift. It will be interesting in 10 years, or 20, to look back at these proto-theorizations and sort the prescient from the alarmist. For now, we are in what Kadue calls “suspension,” unsure what the platform might be doing to us.
Read Katie Kadue’s “Suspended Hell” here, Justin E.H. Smith’s “How Social Media Imperils Scholarship” here, and Joseph M. Keegin’s “The Hysterical Style in American Humanities” here. And keep an eye out for a cluster of essays on Twitter here at the Review — including a powerful defense.