I thought Twitter would amount to nothing more than a syncopated Facebook: with mainly impulsive & sporadic rapid fire speech from people who've whittled the one-liner down to a significant artform. I'd never have suspected to find in this language-hacking a possibility for anything like interesting academic debate. But I have recently discovered it in the form of a Twitter University. Here's The Swedish Twitter University but one shorn of academia's usual editorializing and chronic vetting, an online format that can be sustained only by views brought generously to the Twitter-symposium: here's a real 'democratic' forum, in short, for discussion begun by impassioned authors and theorists who allow their own ideas to grow & develop through response-tweets. In fact, the textbook's been turned into an active online university.
Perhaps it's not 'university' so much as the embodiment of a 'multiversity' ideal very attuned to contemporary Deleuzian understandings of the nature of things: a celebration, in particular, of the quintessentially open text as Barthes may never have imagined it. Administrator Marcus Nilsson spells out for us a 'concept' of the Twitter University almost as an Oulipo restrained-based exercise, with specific instructions as to number and character limit of tweets and even a recommendation not to allow responses, enjambment-style, to flow without full stops from one tweet to the next. Of which, more below:
The Swedish Twitter University: Mind-blowing Ideas in 25 Tweets
The Swedish Twitter University (@SvTwuni) is a place where interesting speakers — scientists, academics, etc. — tweet about exciting ideas from their respective fields in a certain well-defined format.If we take Eileen A. Joy's December 20th "Notes Towards a Speculative Realist Literary Criticism" presentation (brought to my notice by John Bloomberg-Rissman), simple tweeting conventions turn into a fairly coherent and informative presentation of views on "speculative realist" literary criticism (to be permanently archived at Nilsson's site), comprising of the usual acknowledgments, academic terminology & data points (A fuller explication of SR theory can be found here). The format's rather simple, withTweeter, a STU room and, of course, a Twitter account to get things going.
The presentation must comply with certain constraints, meant to stimulate creativity and challenge the tweeters to formulate their ideas as effectively and interestingly as possible:
The tweeter should pay attention to questions from the audience for a total of at least one hour from the start of the presentation. Answer tweets do not count against the total 25. Both questions and answers should contain the hashtag assigned to the event by @SvTwuni. Each presentation will be archived together with the questions and answers from this hashtag.
- A presentation will be a maximum of 25 tweets long. Each tweet has a 140 character limit.
- Each tweet must be broken naturally—no ugly enjambement!(sic) That is, a sentence, clause or phrase may not overflow arbitrarily into several tweets. That’s not to say each and every tweet has to end with a full stop — follow the spirit and not the letter of the rule and be creative!
It’s fine to blurt out all your 25 tweets at once and then take questions, but it might be more interesting if you exploit the fact that Twitter is a conversational medium: adding pauses and answering questions as you go breathes life into your lecture, and since answers don’t count towards your total 25 tweets, answering questions from the audience can give you a few extra tweets to develop your idea in further detail.
In general, I'd say I'm impressed more with the 'how' than the 'what' of Joy's Twitter U. lecture (though I was drawn to this place on the recommendation of someone with whom I've been having an equally interesting discussion on the scope, and limits, of the literary work). Though the topic may have any number of diverse meanings and there is no shortage of critical schools to choose from (some of the more interesting newer ones being 'affect-theory', 'onticology', 'OOO' ), it's only as social media that the Twitter U. can allow Joy's views to take shape and find its audience. Certain online conventions may be mandated (as site owner Nilsson obviously makes clear), a format prescribed and a sort of screening process for Twitter presenter-applicants may be put in place but it's to the essential 'aleatoriness' of online communities that that both the attractiveness and efficacy of Twitter University is primarily due.
I might be tempted to say (in a McLuhanesque moment) that the strangeness of recent critical theory is a function of Twitter-like technology. Even a passing familiarity with some of the theory cited in Joy's Twitter lecture, with its talk of "multitudes", "discrete actions" & "propulsive mechanicity", gives it its own uniquely IT character: and doesn't OOO theory title itself rather resemble the on-off circuitry on which all online discourse depend?
