John Basl has compiled a list of Philosophers using Twitter. This list keeps growing, and I just wanted to help John spread the word. If you don’t know what Twitter is check out his follow up post here. In that second post he discusses the issue – Why would a philosopher want a Twitter account?
I want to pick up there. I agree that it’s not a must have technology, but it’s suprisingly useful and not a total time waster.
Here are 11 things that, as a professional philosopher, I have found useful about Twitter.
1. Get in Touch
The primary benefit of Twitter for philosophers is that it a good means to put philosophers in touch with other philosophers.
2. Staying In Touch
Let’s be honest. How bad are you at staying in touch with friends or colleagues you’ve met at a conference over email? I’m awful at this. Twittering, however, makes this easy. With all the different ways to update Twitter at your disposal (email, Firefox plugin, text message, desktop applications), and the 140 character limit – It takes 2 seconds to post a quick status update. Over a week or a month – these add up and you get a nice snapshot of what you’ve been up to. Two people following each other on Twitter – do stay current with one another without much effort for either party.
3. Professional Help
Following philosophers on Twitter isn’t just about learning that they had some yummy eggs for breakfast. Twitter has actually helped professionally. For example, Basl has been a huge help with Sympoze. As he notes – our contact and most of our interaction is through Twitter.
With regards to research, I usually tweet the topic or title of the paper I’m currently working on. I usually get at least one response from another philosopher interested in the paper. In the six months that I’ve used Twitter, I received a lot of professional help from other philosophers.
4. Forced To-the-Point-Commmunication Reduces Rudeness Worries
Sometimes we feel pressure to carry out email communications longer than they need to be. Haven’t you ever wondered if that terse email you just sent didn’t come off as a little rude? Twitter doesn’t afford space for those kinds of formalities. You only have 140 characters. There’s no room to drone on.
5. Non-Intrusive
Another feature I like about Twitter is that it really is non-intrusive. People must choose to follow you. It is the designated forum for saying pretty much whatever you want to whomever chooses to listen to you. It feels a lot less like spamming when people have opted to follow your Tweets can opt out if you get too annoying.
6. Etiquette Norms
Sometimes I want to tell people how things are going, or solicit feedback – but an email almost always puts a burden of responding. In fact, check out Kvanvig’s discussion of email ettiquette here. This seems to be less of a norm for Twitter. My sense is that unless you specifically direct your Tweet to a particular person, there is less pressure for anyone of your followers to reply to you. Even if there is some pressure – the replies are capped at 140 characters.
7. Minimal Facebook
I like Facebook, but it has way too many bells and whistles. It can become a big time waster. There are three main features about Facebook that I like and use regularly. I like reading status updates from my friends, and I like writing status updates. I also like the chat function. With Google Reader – I can read all of my friends status updates. With Pidgin, I can integrate Facebook chat with all of my other IM accounts. With Twitter, I can update my status. Facebook has an application that let’s you automatically have Twitter update your Facebook Status with your tweets. So, Twitter is part of my Minimal Facebook plan. I can pretty much get by without ever logging into Facebook, to use the features that I use most.
Extra cool feature – your direct messages and replies (@username) are not updated in your Facebook status. Only tweets to the public become status updates. You might annoy some of your friends with a barrage of status updates if you tweet alot – but at least they won’t also be getting your (@username) replies.
8. Blog Updates
This blog is powered by WordPress, and there is a cool WordPress plugin for Twitter. Whenever I publish a post, my Twitter account automatically tweets “New Blog Entry: “Title” – [link]”
9. Fun
You can see philosophers having fun on Twitter. My favorite have been the recent series of Philosophy Haiku that the folks at UW-Madison have started. The goal is to summarize the main point of an important philosophical paper in Haiku.
It’s also just generally nice learning about what other philosophers are interested in and amused by.
10. Third Party App Integration
Twitter integrates nicely with some other applications to make your life easier. My favorite is the Remember the Milk integration. Here’s what you do. Set up a Remember the Milk account (which btw the way also integrates with other applications like Gmail and Thunderbird). In your account settings, give it your twitter login information. Follow Remember the Milk on Twitter. Now you can add tasks to your todo list in anyway that you would update your Twitter account (email, text message, desktop application, Firefox plugin). You can also have reminders sent to you via Twitter.
11. Twitter as a Teaching Tool
Basl notes that he and Juan Comesana have had success using Twitter to communicate. Basl is Comesana’s TA this semester. He explains here why Twitter is a bit more optimal than other forms of communication for this task. The advantage of using Twitter is that users can set themselves up to be maximally accessible to people they follow. You can have a Twitter desktop application, You can get emailed updates from Twitter, and you can get text messages from people you follow. If you elect to follow someone in all of these ways, then they can be more confident that they’ll reach you sooner on Twitter than any other means. If they email you, you might be away from your computer. If they text you, you might not have your phone (or they might not have your number). But if they send you a direct message on Tweet and you’ve set it up to get updates from them through all of the channels, you’ll get the message sooner.
I’m thinking about experimenting with Twitter next semester for course announcements and reading assignments. Students can choose how to get the memo. They check the site daily and they won’t need to sign up for anything. I can embed a badge on the course webpage. If they elect to sign-up for a twitter account, then they can have course announcements texted or emailed to them if they choose. If I do, I’ll let you know.
Thanks for the idea about using Twitter for class announcements. I’m going to do that this quarter in my Intro to Philosophy class. I can imagine many was for it to be useful. For example, suppose a TA gets sick the night before her discussion section, tells me, I post it on Twitter, students get a text message that lets them know they can sleep in the next day. How awesome is that? Now I kind of want one my TAs to get sick this quarter so I can do this. 🙂
Hi Josh,
No problem. Using Twitter for course announcements is kind of awesome. I’ve been using it this semester, and I think it’s been working out very well.
Twitter is the newest craze today. i tweet at least 5 times a day on my friends just to keep them informed about my whereabouts. I still keep my personal blog though. ..
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