Must-Read: Patrick Iber: How Academics Can Use Twitter

Must-Read: Patrick Iber: How Academics Can Use Twitter: “Two of the most important debates we have been having in academe in the last few years center on the issues of contingent labor and public engagement…

..The contingent labor debate reflects the poor conditions of the tenure-track job market… The public engagement debate… [is] forms: 1) a perennial lament that academics are bad writers and 2) asking whether public engagement should count for tenure and promotion…. There may be much bad academic writing, but there is a flourishing ecosystem of public writing by academics…. There is an audience for erudite criticism and lively, timely and accessible academic work. Precarity helped create the new public scholar; in a twist of fate, the success of contingent voices in finding an audience for their work may have now helped to raise expectations for those occupying scarce tenure-track jobs….

You can, of course, be a publicly engaged scholar in many ways, but the anxieties about Twitter seem particularly acute. It is sometimes reviled as a waste of time to be avoided. But it is most often treated with puzzlement…. You do not have to join…. When I became contingent, I decided I had nothing left to lose. Since then I have found it enormously helpful, both personally and professionally. I don’t need Twitter itself to count for anything, but it facilities activities that already count…. It allows academics and people in other knowledge industries to interact directly. Twitter is the preferred social network of journalists…. Twitter is the place where you can share what you know and try to find someone to let you write it up at greater length…. Academics… often live in isolation from other people who share their research interests. Twitter is a good way to find those people out there who do share them….

What Should I Avoid Doing?

Don’t, under any circumstances, complain about your students. Twitter is a public forum. They’re students; they’re learning. If you’re tenured or on the tenure track, don’t complain…. If you’re a graduate student or contingent, be careful…. Don’t complain about your employer…. Don’t try to be too cool….

Second: don’t be horrible. Twitter is widely acknowledged to have a problem with abuse…. Don’t engage; block immediately…