In a recent issue of English Studies, Edmund G.C. King takes a two-year-old incident on Twitter and uses it to develop a series of observations about literary value, taste, and cultural prestige in the age of social media. The incident was this: In August of 2020, the author Jess McHugh tweeted out a list of what she called the “Top 7 Warning Signs in a Man’s Bookshelf.” Entries included “too much Hemingway,” “any amount of Bukowski,” and “a dogeared copy of Infinite Jest.” Somewhat improbably, the tweet went viral; it was even covered by a handful of news organizations. I’d seen it myself at the time, though I’d entirely forgotten about it until I read King’s article.
King offers close readings of the hundreds of rebuttals, endorsements, and variations McHugh’s tweet inspired, and he explains the place of her list in several larger contexts: hook-up site “red flag” warnings, contests over gender and the literary canon, the recursive structure of “meme culture,” the strategies of social signaling used in internet dating. It’s a bravura example of how an apparently trivial piece of internet ephemera can, when approached with the right set of tools, open up a whole world, here the world of “book-talk” as it unfolds on social media.
That world is not, as King paints it, an altogether rosy one. Although social media offers moments of aesthetic play — King quotes the media-studies scholar Emma A. Jane on the “palimpsestic” nature of humorous or ironic meme manipulation — its most prominent tendency, as King describes it, is toward innovating “new forms of competitive behaviour among users,” competition not just between individuals but between user-clusters vying for quantifiable ascendency in a social structure stratified by numbers of followers and “likes.” (That stratification reflects only very roughly — and sometimes seems not to reflect at all — offline hierarchies of prestige, which is one reason that champions of Twitter see it as democratic or anti-elitist.) Social media’s “coercively affiliative logic” ultimately fragments users into groups of the like-minded according to a pattern of what the sociologist of social media Brady Robards, borrowing the concept from the French sociologist Michel Maffesoli, calls “neo-tribalism.”
The neo-tribe, as Robards explains, is by no means a pejorative designation. In Maffesoli’s original usage, it referred to impromptu associations marked “by fluidity, occasional gathering and dispersal.” Maffesoli thought such transient alliances were characteristic of postmodernity. Robards argues “that neo-tribal connections can also cohere over time, such that friendships and partnerships can spring forth from the kinds of fleeting connections” Maffesoli describes.
