Serious Academic
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 1 This prompt is so fun! I say this because social media is obviously something that I’ve grown up in and know a little bit about. This makes me question something I haven’t before, however, even though it doesn’t really have to do with today’s blog post: Is social media a form of DH? Hmm. I feel like we are making it that way, because when in this “Serious Academic” aspect of social media is growing, we really are putting essays on the Internet, and though they weren’t originally written as printed text but rather an excerpt from Word or loaded PDF, don’t they still count as literary academia?
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 To the point . . .
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 1 I agree with Kevin Gannon. It took a while for me to be convinced by his essay, but by the end, I was all for social media as a scholarly platform. My first thoughts were as follows, and my comments would have been: I haven’t ever gotten a social media account until last year. These essays would have never been accessible to me back then, so why not publish on a text-based medium such as a journal or write your own ranting book, so that we can all read it? Not all of us sit on our phones all day infinitely scrolling. And, Isn’t Twitter, and all social media, supposed to be for short, witty snippets of a post? You can’t post an entire essay on Twitter and expect John Doe, who’s sitting on the toilet with his phone, to stop constantly scrolling and suddenly become interested in your entire 1,000 word essay. But then, Gannon got me with this sentence: “I can say that me and others like me have found social media to be a democratizing and invigorating scholarly space.” This is true. Though all of the old people and social media revolters like myself won’t be able to see it, just think of all the people who will see it. Maybe toilet-sitting John Doe won’t be interested. But what about Jane Doe, PhD, and Doctor Peter Doe, Harvard graduate and literary researcher.
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 1 If we aren’t going to publish through text, the next best thing is social media, where the next biggest group, the newest, next generation group, will be found. How easy is it to write a quick comment? How fun is it to scroll through 26 comments of people bashing each other and they don’t even have to hold back? How would we be able to “comment” if Gannon was to write an entire book about this topic–just include it in our review of it on Amazon? He says, “This blog, and my activity on Twitter, has opened my scholarly world to places and people I would have never interacted with otherwise.” Yes, true. But then it should be published on both sides of the DH spectrum: social media, and text, where your local 60 year old doctorate can find it in the literary archives. This 428 class has made a lot of points of how our world has changed and is changing to a digital world, but this essay points out how far the digitized world has come.
¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0
¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 1 In a comment back to Julie Brannon, who says, “The days of phones being only phones are over . . . Guess who’s gonna get funding in the end? Yeah, the ones who are embracing ways to connect with the public.” I would agree. This is such a good point. If you want to be an academic scholar, you are going to, most of the time, have to move with the world. The world is moving! Part of being a scholar, and wanting people to read your work, is that you have to find the people. Of course, though, you have to name your audience. If your essay is about the struggles of a college graduate in a research internship of new-age literature, social media is your friend. If your essay is focused on the prescription pills found in purses of 1950’s housewives and why, then you may want to focus on people who were there and would love to read about this–hence, the old woman sitting in her recliner reading about Mother’s Little Helper.
¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 1 Lastly, a comment back to Neo Haligonian, who says, “I must say that the people I know who seem to have time to build a prominent profile on social media are mostly men–mostly tenure-track or, more usually, tenured, middle-class white men.” Who is this guy and who does he know? No. Twitter is filled with 20-somethings, who are in graduate school, hair design school, bartenders, servers, novel reviewers, Kylie-Jenner-lip-obsessors. Social media is for the young, the new, the vibrant. I can’t think of one middle-aged, middle-class, man who sits on Twitter all day. What?
This reminds me of the ‘essays’ people write on Twitter, using multiple tweets to form the essay (I think we’re going to read one later in the semester?). I’m curious, as you are, to see if our class thinks this qualifies as DH scholarship or not.