Connection

No, I don’t have anything terribly profound to say about the current smorgasbord of social media platforms, but it’s an excuse to post this bit of ineffable cool…

As someone with multiple accounts on the Twitter, it’s probably inevitable that I have different, not necessary coherent criteria for evaluating new systems (and deciding whether to put any effort into existing ones).

To start with the specific expectations of @Thucydiocy: I dream of a platform without misattributed Thucydides quotations – and one of the consequences of Twitter’s steady descent into chaotic decadence has been a marked decline in those, even in the ‘Scholars and Warriors’ category, to the point where I might almost dream of retirement (yes, I’ve seen enough odd-couple buddy cop movies to know that this is a fatal statement). But there is always the suspicion that it’s simply moved elsewhere, and that does mean that, as an absolutely bare minimum, I need to be able to check. No hashtags? No ability to search for key terms? Threads, you’re already useless. (Mastodon seems misattribution-free, but I’m not sure how far I trust its search function. Post? Does anyone actually post anything there amidst the tumbleweed?).

CthulhuUK and the Thucydides Cats have had their moments in the last few years, but not enough to persuade me to invest any time in establishing their presence elsewhere; so, it’s a question of what happens to me as me. There was an interesting post earlier in the week from an Australia academic who goes by The Thesis Whisperer on Academic Enshittification, drawing on Cory Doctorow’s persuasive theory about how online platforms begin by offering their users a great service to draw them in, then screw them over for the benefit of business owners, and then screw over the business owners in order to grab all the value for themselves. And then die.

Academics are both users and business owners when it comes to social media. Basically, it’s no longer true that you build can a substantial audience by doing Good Work and telling people about it. Today you can talk about your research on social media platforms all you want, but hardly anyone will hear you unless you pay cash money because Algorithms.

Personally speaking: well, kinda. Self-advertisement has never been a particularly big motive for my engagement with social media, or I might have cultivated a more serious and respectable online persona. I do advertise my blog posts, for the endorphin rush of seeing that a whole twenty people have visited it, however briefly, this week – but that’s become an end in itself, rather than imagining that somehow my blog or Twitter presence can be leveraged into anything other than occasional confusion that somehow I can feel I know someone pretty well and yet we’ve never met. I mean, I pay to keep adverts off the blog, rather than making any money from it.

So, no, primarily I remain a user rather than a business. What Twitter offers is, still, however imperfectly compared with a few years ago, an almost immediate sense of what’s going on in the world, and in different academic disciplines, and from many different perspectives; I’ve spent years building up different lists and identifying the people I can trust on different topics, and working out how to manage it effectively; and, while some of those people are no longer there, it still works pretty well. Or at any rate much better than the alternatives.

It’s certainly true that I have a privileged experience; not being a woman, or gay, or non-white, or a celebrity, I basically get ignored and can follow crazy far-right loons (predominantly, those who adopt ‘Thucydides’ as an alias so pop up in my regular searches) as a homeopathic insight into crazy far-right conspiracy land rather than a constant threat or harangue. And I’m insignificant enough that I can be myself – or maybe not exactly myself, but a more rounded version, including the aspects that many years ago used to write satirical newsletters and be unbearably pretentious about music and would have loved memes – without any fear of consequences.

Dance like nobody’s watching; tweet like everybody’s reading. Yes, if you wanted a case study in ‘staid middle-aged academic attempts to get down with the young people’ it could be me on social media, and very probably I would have written more and wasted less time without it. But I would also genuinely know less and have a narrower view on the world, and it is entirely infuriating that Space Karen threatens to take all this away and leave me just with a choice of places that are more or less nice, sensible, dull and limited. Yes, a load of people have left – but too many are still there, and not easily found in the other places, for me to jump ship, even if the bastard destroys Tweetdeck. To be honest I wasn’t there for civility in the first place…