Month: November 2017

This is a long-form reflection on my short-form commitments. In other words, while I’m not disappearing from Twitter altogether, I’m going to be cutting back significantly on my usage of the platform. I took a break from academic social media — from #medievaltwitter and from the Facebook groups populated by medievalists — as some of the discussions over the role in Medieval Studies of scholars trained in Arabic and Islamic Studies became infuriatingly narrow and dismissive of the kinds of expertise that my most immediate colleagues and I have spent long and difficult years cultivating in favor of more overarching (and, theoretically, unifying) theoretical approaches. The zenith of this break was a week I spent out of the country with no access to the internet whatsoever. After the better part of a month more or less away from #medievaltwitter and its ancillaries, my mood was dramatically improved and my head far clearer. Even as those fractious conversations have slipped down everyone’s timelines, I realize that even before that the medium was taking a toll on me.

I’m finding that medieval social media has become tedious (with a few notable exceptions, always) even as the Middle Ages and its pursuit have grown more topical and relevant of late. The people with whom I very much agree politically have been reduced to saying the same thing over and over again. This is not to say that those things don’t need to be said to the wider world — they clearly do — it’s that as an in-group professional conversation, the constant repetition of the same rhetoric has lost its interest for me. I’m ready for a space to explore new ideas not only about my scholarship but about how best to use the popular interest in medievalism to help to support a liberal vision of civil society; I’m frustrated that #medievaltwitter is becoming a space where political agreement is coming to signify and require intellectual agreement and streamlining.

I didn’t initially think of my withdrawal from social media as a consequence of earning tenure, but upon reflection I think it’s connected. (Actually, I think it says something that both of my post-tenure trips were to places where I was completely cut off from internet access for a week at a time. I didn’t just need a break from having been living at my desk nonstop since 2010, but from all of the social consequences of that.)

I suspect that my post-tenure self no longer needs the instant gratification that can sometimes come from being a part of a social media-medievalist peer group and can instead feel a part of a medievalist community that is a better fit. #medievaltwitter very much reflects the fact that the field of Medieval Studies is fundamentally allied, in disciplinary terms, with English literature. There’s nothing wrong with English literature, it’s just not my scene.  My participation in that community made sense when my primary concern was earning tenure, when the main thing taking up space in my head was academic per se rather than the subject of my work, and when the people I saw as my closest colleagues were those who, ironically, were at a remove from my work and could be supportive because they wouldn’t be adjudicating it. In stepping back from Twitter I lose that unique sustained immediacy of discussion that can sustain a person in the isolation of the tenure track and the instantaneous approval of a global cheering section of colleagues. But with tenure I don’t feel like I might be losing a tenuous grip on my professional and intellectual relationships by not having them reinforced daily. I have an easier sense of who my colleagues really are; they are not in English literature and they’re not going anywhere. They’re the Hispanists and Arabists who speak the same intellectual language I speak (and speak and read the same human ones). They’re the ones I’m looking forward to talking through my next project the next time we meet, whenever that might be, on the project’s terms and on ours; and they’re the ones with whom I can brainstorm productively about how to use our specific kind of expertise to help reach out to and educate the public.

I am so grateful to the senior colleagues who handle their social media presence with real grace, passion, and anti-hierarchical collegiality, but by this point I think that I have learned what I can from them in that arena. Junior tweeps, if you need anything read or need job market advice or anything, don’t think twice about asking. I’m still around. If you need another voice in your cheering section, just say so and I will lend mine. I want to continue modeling the best of #medievaltwitter that I’ve learned from the senior tweeps, but for myself I need to hang back from the daily fray.

I think that from here on out I’ll be doing more retweeting than tweeting. And I’m going to treat the platform more like a Sunday long-read that I’ll catch up on intensively once (or twice or so) a week. Even with the new expanded character limit, I don’t find this platform to be conducive to thoughtful discussion anymore. I expect that I’ll treat this as a space for checking in with tweeps who really have become my friends over the last few years, for a little banter, for sharing news and articles; but it’s not going to be my discussion space going forward. That’s not a comment on how I read medieval marginalia (just to preempt that accusation, that is sometimes thrown around when others have come to similar conclusions…) and it’s not to say that it can’t be a useful platform for that for some people and for some conversations — it’s just not working for me anymore. I don’t expect I’ll jump in for long, involved conversations with either academics or lay people.

My head, post-tenure, is clear enough to be ready for narrative rather than for a series of salvos and my internet usage is going to begin to reflect that. Vale.