A lot of philosophy twitter accounts have gone dormant (like mine) or have now disappeared.
What are we losing with the philosophical Twitter community?
I always liked the prickliness of Twitter and the resistance to a kind of conformity mindset I often encounter on FB and other places. However, the loss of important functionality on the site which is now X (such as the removal of headlines and circles), the prioritizing of blue tick accounts that have little of interest to say, and the increasing vitriol, as well as the fact that I was recently banned without explanation or ability to appeal, have led me to largely check out from it.
I got a lot out of Twitter and am very grateful for the community I was able to build there, and the connections. As I became curious about what other philosophers got out of Twitter, I put some testimonies I collected, with their permission.
Many are philosophers who are on the path to an alt-ac career, such as Lynn Chiu:
Thanks to Twitter, or what it used to be, I was able to sustain my social identity as an academic philosopher after I quit my postdoc. The "flatness" of Twitter enabled me to constantly find comrades and collaborators hidden in little niches across all disciplines, eventually bootstrapping a new philosophical path without losing my identity and colleagues. I know that this is not the experience many have with Twitter. I was lucky to have just enough of the right kind of followers to have fun, honest, and open interactions without attracting its dark side or fanning my ego. Now that Twitter is no longer Twitter, but X-- a site with a vision I never signed up for-- I am forced to leave this platform and rethink what it is to be a philosopher in practice, to philosophize in the real world, and to build academic communities. @drlynnchiu
In a similar vein, many philosophers who are self-described "on the margin of academia" and who do not follow a traditional path, found connection on Twitter:
As a philosopher and researcher who is on the margin of academia, due to not pursuing the traditional PhD route, and due to being « first-generation », Twitter was absolutely vital for me as a window into the world of academic philosophy. At a crucial moment where I needed to « find my people » in order to know I could pursue philosophy, Twitter allowed me to coordinate with other academics in a way that my atypical profile wouldn’t have allowed otherwise. How important this was to my philosophical thinking is hard to understate : without those conversations, I would have had no way to *think together*, no feedback, no way to experience the productive « disconcertment » one experiences when one talks to a *colleague* and yet still struggles to be understood.--Pierrick Simon
There have always been a fair number of grad students on Twitter. Some of them have gathered large following, but there are also several smaller accounts of grad students and also people who are/were thinking of applying to grad school, such as this anonymous grad student:
I was one of very few philosophy undergraduate majors at my old institution, and those that I did know in person were interested in philosophy for law school purposes. Pre-Elon Twitter was not only the first place where I found fellow philosophy students, but it also was a place that allowed me to get in contact with graduate students and academics at institutions that was thinking about applying to for graduate school. I miss that community deeply.—anonymous grad student
Finally, there are also quite some traditional academic philosophers, including professors with tenure (like me!) who enjoyed Twitter and got a lot of intellectual engagement out of it. Vernon Cisney describes (aka "Deleuze Clues") describes the experience as follows:
Before I logged onto Twitter, I had scrupulously avoided entanglements with the world of social media. Never jumped onto Friendster, Myspace, or Second Life, and, despite its endurance, I’ve never launched a Facebook account. I don’t understand Flickr or Tumblr, and I’ve repeatedly had my children explain to me the differences between Instagram and Pinterest. I think there may have been a Vine in there at some point. Social media has just never seemed like my thing.
In May 2018, I decided to take the plunge and create a social media presence in an effort to expand my academic network; for whatever reason, Twitter seemed the platform for me. At the time, I was infrequently contributing to a blog and having difficulty directing traffic to it, and Twitter’s format seemed a useful mode of announcement.
Five years later, as it is dying, it is clear that Twitter has extended my philosophical and intellectual life in ways I could never have imagined. Without mentioning names (because I know I will inadvertently leave people out), I would like to briefly list a few. It has put me in touch with countless academics in and around my areas of interest, allowing me to foster relationships that have been further nurtured at conferences and beyond. More than a few of these relationships have led to professional collaborations and resulted in publications.
Twitter has enabled me to reconnect with a number of friends from graduate school and from past conferences. It has introduced me to a wide array of scholars and professors beyond the world of continental philosophy, professors I would be unlikely to meet in the conference circles I frequent. I have been extremely lucky to make a number of online friendships with independent scholars and lifelong learners, and I greatly value these many interactions. It has opened me to a number of connections with communist and anarchist thinkers, radical religious and political thinkers. It has introduced me to more than a few podcast hosts and organizers, creating lasting friendships both personal and professional.
On many occasions I have sought pedagogical advice from the Twitter community, advice for both teaching strategies and reading lists. In short, Twitter has enriched my intellectual life beyond what I ever anticipated.
Johnathan Flowers (going under the Twitter handle @shengokai) discusses how Twitter was a way to do philosophy differently and to engage the public:
[There are] philosophers who believed Twitter could be a space to do philosophy in public, to demonstrate the valuable contributions of our field to a largely uncaring audience. This is largely how I used my Twitter presence: to make clear philosophical implications of social or cultural events, to place a public with little philosophical acumen in conversation with the broader field of philosophy beyond the western canon, and to demonstrate the ways in which philosophy mattered in and to our lives. To this end, the “end of Twitter,” ushered in by Elon Musk and his vision of a “Digital Public Square” imperils this specific use of twitter due to the ways in which it creates a context where the circulation of such views is subject to violent or offensive pushback largely by members of a power majority for whom other ways of seeing the world are threatening. While this isn’t much different from the way things were on twitter prior to Musk’s takeover, the dismantling of trust and safety mechanisms as well as Musk’s own proliferation of alt-right and white supremacist views make this use of twitter a more fraught activity than before.
What is also lost in the collapse of Twitter is community. The downward spiral of twitter has resulted in the flight of many marginalized philosophers from twitter, and the unwillingness of others to continue to use the platform in their absence. What is lost, in this case, is a community of care, of support, and of philosophers interested in doing philosophy differently. What is lost is a community that circulates similar experiences of struggle, of difficulty, and of survival in a discipline that is often as hostile to them as the culture which gave rise to it. What is lost is a means whereby we can come together to celebrate one another’s achievements, to share knowledge collaboratively, and to connect across global distances such that the community of inquiry that is philosophy can grow in depth and through compassion. What is lost are unique events like the CogTweeto Conference Series, whose origins in twitter offered a way to do philosophy and the philosophy conference differently. What is lost is the sharing of the struggles of junior and contingent faculty, struggles which the broader field largely remains ignorant of.
As Flowers notes,
the biggest loss for the field of philosophy in the collapse of twitter is the potential to do philosophy differently, to show the world that philosophy need not be done in the ways that are dominated by the “old guard,” those members of the field who believe that philosophy should concern itself with a limited range of topics, and then to engage with those topics in such a way as to maintain the status quo; those philosophers who are so comfortable in their positions that they believe it is their right, and their responsibility, to police the ways that philosophy can be done. Perhaps the biggest loss for the field of philosophy in the wake of Twitter’s demise is the possibility of a more egalitarian, more open vision of what the field of philosophy could, and should be.
For my part, I have moved platforms before: from the golden age of the philosophy group blogosphere (ca 2010-2015, NewApps, Prosblogion, I remain on Philosophers' Cocoon for the time being) to Facebook (ca 2015-2019), to Medium (2017-2020), to Twitter (2014-2023). I am feeling pretty jaded about their inevitable enshittification (this is a technical term by Cory Doctorow), but I really do like the connection online.
Moreover, I find community-building important, I don't want to be geographically constrained to only my colleagues or people in the area, and I also think it's vital we not only make connections through the medium of expensive and CO2-heavy conferences. The affordances a platform encourages or discourages are crucial, so it is important for me to find good online spaces. I'm now mainly on Bluesky and on Substack, we will see what the future brings.
Hi Helen! I'm not very active on social media and don't even have a Twitter account, but I'd like to add that https://fediphilosophy.org/ is a very nice platform to connect with other philosophers!
Posted by: anon | 12/21/2023 at 06:37 AM