Max Noichl, a graduate student at the University of Vienna, made a map of philosophy tweeters (based on followers and retweets) which is making the rounds on Twitter. I'm not really sure what it means, but it looks neat! (Mr. Noichl offers some explanation here.)
Friends and colleagues like Leslie Green at Oxford and Queen's, and Eric Posner here at Chicago, used Twitter for awhile, but then gave up (Green later returned, but, wisely, doesn't engage). I don't abandon the medium because I know some folks now follow the blog through Twitter links (my main activity on Twitter), and some of those I follow also post interesting material. Prompted by the new Twitter map, herewith some observations about this strange medium:
1. Putting aside those already famous, "success" on Twitter (i.e., lots of followers) seems to track three things: actual expertise (e.g., about infectious diseases, about criminal law) which one shares on Twitter on a regular basis in long threads; championing a political or partisan cause on a regular basis, which attracts a flock of like-minded partisans; or extensive tweeting and extensive engagement with others (e.g, retweeting, responding, entering "dialogues" on Twitter). There are outlier cases (e.g., Scott Shapiro, the funniest academic on Twitter, with his serial shticks), but most of the Twitter users with substantial followings (e.g., 30k or more followers) seem to fall into at least one of these categories, and sometimes more than one.
2. Blocking nuisance Twitterati is, itself, a nuisance. Twitter basically has all the worst features of an unmoderated comment thread on a blog or anywhere else in cyberspace, and so all the laws of cyber-dynamics apply. "Condescension from below" is the primary form of expression for the average active Twitter user which, combined with the Dunning-Kruger effect, makes for a mess.
4. There is a huge amount of impotent rage on Twitter, no doubt because many of its most active participants are people without real status, accomplishments or positions in the world. As Nietzsche diagnosed in On the Genealogy of Morality, impotent rage satisfies itself with the imaginary revenge of inverting values and reality to satisfy the desire for actual vengeance. (For mysterious reasons--given my boring opinions and mild-mannered persona--some of this impotent rage and its revaluation comes my way: I have been amused to see people on Twitter annoyed with me declare, inter alia, that my Nietzsche work isn't good, that my legal philosophy work isn't good, that no one reads my blog, that no one pays attention to the PGR rankings, and on and on.) The impotent rage is exacerbated by the group polarization effects of the medium, in which a circle of similarly impotent and enraged people encourage each other into believing ever more extreme versions of their alternative vision of reality (the Twitter map, above, captures this well). (On philosophy Twitter, this is mostly a phenomenon of the infantile Wokerati.)
5. Because Twitter has no filter, and encourages instantaneous expression, it tends to expose weird and dysfunctional people who would otherwise travel under the radar. (Recall Nathan Oseroff-Spicer, whose serial misconduct--starting on Twitter but radiating out from there--led the APA Blog to introduce reforms to preclude future bad behavior like his.) The tendency of narcissists to "share too much" is also amplified in this forum (e.g., a couple of months ago, a reader flagged for me members of the "Twitter Red Guard" [Peterson and Shafiei] fighting it out on Twitter: P. accused S. of being "performatively woke," controlling and manipulative; S. accused P. of queerbashing, doxxing and failing to check her privilege. I doubt any grown-up could figure out what this is about!) I think the best advice for graduate students, lest they self-destruct in public, is, if they are going to use Twitter at all, to use it solely for professional tweets, of the kind they would be glad for a hiring committee to review.
BELATED ADDENDUM (1/8/21): I am a bit late to this but it was only recently brought to my attention. I shouldn't be surprised that Mr. Oseroff-Spicer is really a shameless liar and dissembler, but I confess I still find it a bit mystifying. Here is his response to the brief parenthetical mention, above, of his well-documented history of misconduct:
(1) There are no "fabricated statements" about him on this blog, let alone "repeatedly published ones," and he can cite none. Unfortunately for him the editor of the APA blog confirmed what others had told me, namely, that he had been briefly suspended from his role at the blog after his (a) abuse of his editing privileges at the blog to harass philosopher Kathleen Stock (a prior victim of his defamation); and (b) unauthorized use of his position to "investigate" a philosophical organization. Because of his abuse of his position, the APA Blog subsequently adopted rules to preclude such misconduct. Mr. Oseroff-Spicer even made a public apology for his misconduct, from which he has been retreating ever since.
(2) I have not "been posting about him almost monthly for the past two years" (although that does describe well the frequency of his lying about me on Twitter I have discovered). In the last 12 months, Mr. Oseroff-Spicer was mentioned exactly twice prior to the post above.
(3) Mr. Oseroff-Spicer--dense and dishonest as he is--must surely know that he has no legal remedies for any of my statements (see again [1], above). Indeed, any defamation lawyer could so advise him for free.
(4) That "only a few people in academic philosophy ever reached out to me to express any solidarity over his continued pubic harassment and repeated attempts to get me fired from a job" is surely because most adults in academic philosophy can see that it is not "harassment" to expose someone's documented misconduct (not their "speaking out against anti-trans philosophers," but rather the misconduct noted above [in 1]). Moreover, since the misconduct pertained to his (unpaid) "job" (as an APA Blog editor), it was wholly appropriate to expect that misconduct to result in his dismissal. (Imagine a professor complaining about being fired for professional misconduct, like sexual harassment!) No one expresses "solidarity" with serial wrongdoers like Mr. Oseroff-Spicer; if anyone did, it was no doubt because they had been misled by his dissembling.
If he continues to lie about me and about his own misconduct, I will continue to remind the academic community of the facts.
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