This is by no means a ‘hot’ take, if anything it is a moderately cool one. I finally deleted my Twitter/X accounts. I had several. One for me as an academic, one for a bot I created and one for a module I teach on Digital Geographies.
Loads of people have written about leaving X/Twitter, like journalists and organisations. Many have discussed moving to BlueSky, another very similar social network, linked for a time with one of the creators of Twitter – which in itself is not without issues. Others use Mastodon, but I haven’t found enough people to connect with on there.
I have been using BlueSky a bit. I have a Mastodon account and look occasionally. I also use LinkedIn a bit, as many academics seem to have shifted in that direction. However, with the latter it all feels a bit too much like a stream of announcements of other people being more successful, not that I’m not pleased for them, but its not always good for your own wellbeing. Also, there seems to be a shift to a sort of broadcast mentality, not sure how helpful it is though… This blog auto-posts to those three platforms as well, so maybe I am perpetuating that.
There was a period between around 2010 and 2016(ish) when I took a great deal of comfort and value from the networks I was involved in on Twitter. I was a postdoc between 2010-2013 outside of geography and I made a sort of academic ‘home’ for myself online with colleagues across a number of disciplines. When I joined my current department in 2013, I was part of a team that studied the uses of Twitter in the performance of controversy, in which we detailed some of the forms of community and network –making practices in which I had myself variously engaged. We argued (on p. 117), and I think this still holds:
These mediated communities clearly generate publics in terms of both who and what is being shared or passed on. We argue it is crucial to understand that digital media platforms themselves are performative, and participate in the shaping of a public. Furthermore, we argue that this epistemically situates issue ‘publicisation’ research differently, in novel and perhaps difficult, contexts. Rather than debate, or presuppose, the ontological character of ‘digital’ or ‘online’ debates, we instead attend to the ‘productive confusions’ of mediation.
We find ourselves in all sorts of different contexts, all sorts different ‘publics’, with and through digital platforms and have to puzzle out how to make sense of them. We collectively construct the norms as we go (as Nancy Baym has discussed), and for a time that seemed to work on Twitter, but contexts shift and can (and did!) radically change. The ‘home’ online that many, I think, felt and the sort of ‘public square’ that Twitter may or may not have performed (at least for journalists in the global North) has now gone. It wasn’t all great though. One of the reasons I created GeoCritBot was my frustration with people churning out announcements of papers and projects following what I perceived to be the currently trendy ideas, I was trying to satirise the ‘hot take’ almost identikit approach to quick scholarship. I am really not sure that it worked but it still exists, mostly for posterity.
Sometime it can be a mistake to dwell on the past, but I think it is also worthwhile remembering things that worked. For a brief period I learned from and connected with many others I wouldn’t have otherwise via Twitter and I am thankful for that. I have been lucky enough to be able to re-connect with people in-person at conferences and academic events but that costs money. In these uncertain times, I know that many of us just don’t get those opportunities. So the possibilites for connecting online become a bit more urgent and yet at the same time, in the current geopolitical climate, they have become very fraught. I can imagine that many of us are stumbling along trying to find ways to connect digitally. There’s plenty of scholarship that is addressing these changes out there and I won’t try to review that here. Instead, I simply wanted to (arbitrarily) mark the moment.
So grab your things and stumble into the night
Home– LCD Soundsystem
So we can shut the door
And shut the door on terrible times
Oh
Yeah, do it right
And head again into space
So you can carry on
And carry on, and fall all over the place
