I began using Twitter in 2012. My first tweet was about the death of the unconventional Inquisition historian Benzion Netanyahu and I joined the site because I wanted to share the news, knew that none of my Facebook friends would particularly care, and had a vague sense that academics hung out on Twitter.
It’s been just over ten years, and my time on Twitter is evidently over. While I was setting up my (gloriously purple!) new iPhone, I accidentally disconnected my account from the two-factor authentication app that I have been using since Elon Musk limited 2fa-by-text message to paying subscribers. I’m locked out of my account, the three employees left at Twitter can’t verify my identity, and that’s that.
Early on, Twitter was a lifeline for me. The #medievaltwitter community really helped me conceive of myself as a medievalist rather than as any of the other things my odd-duck, interdisciplinary, multilingual self might be. I met folks who were supportive and encouraging as I raced against the clock to finish my first book and earn tenure. And it was a huge privilege to be able to listen in on and begin to participate in conversations in other corners of the wide academic medieval world.
Transformative as it initially was, those benefits didn’t last. I grew increasingly frustrated with folks in the English-medieval world who have come to believe that the myth of the magic medievalist (which holds true for teaching — we can teach absolutely anything we’re asked to at the undergraduate level, and we’re often asked to teach everything before the 18th century) holds for research as well, and that being an Anglophone medievalist qualifies you to pronounce ex cathedra on everything from Arabic paleography to Ethiopic chronicles, even if you don’t read the languages. It ranged from disappointing to despair-inducing to watch my own hard-won expertise and that of my colleagues totally denigrated and disregarded because any medievalist can do anything that any other medievalist does.
By the time the Musk-induced mass exodus from the platform began, I’d already bowed out of most of the #medievaltwitter conversations by now, mostly enjoyed the platform for enthusiastic recommendations of new-to-me books, and had begun branching out into following poetry twitter. My view wasn’t as apocalyptic as some; I don’t imagine the site truly going under any time soon. But all the same, I’m out.
Forty-eight hours off the site have been pleasantly quiet. I might create a new account and try to recreate my community of readers with fascinating and wide-ranging taste, and of Arabists, who never doubt the importance of actually being able to read Arabic before having an opinion on what a text says. But that won’t be at least until the fall, if at all. Right now I’m enjoying the quiet. I’m increasingly burned out, both because of changes in the pastoral care responsibilities we have for post-pandemic students and, mostly, because of the increase in electronic communication that the pandemic forced. I’m happy to have one less thing to check, one less set of notifications.
I’m also happy about the prospect of returning to longer form writing here. I’ve been thinking for a long time about returning to blogging more seriously, but between Twitter for short things and trying to do more public-facing, proper, edited, in-a-periodical publishing for longer things, I was at a loss for how to use this space. So hopefully that will become clearer.
It’s the end of an era for me, but between the Musk takeover and a lot of changes that I have coming down the pike in my personal and professional lives, it’s a good moment to mark and make a change, even if it was all because of a tech glitch.