A while back, I blogged about why I think Twitter can be good for professional philosophers. Within the last few weeks, my enthusiasm has grown – so I’d like to say a bit more.
I’m now following quite a few philosophers on Twitter, and the result of this is an excellent stream of up-to-the-minute philosophy news.
Twitter gets reamed as the latest form of internet narcissism, but there’s a lot more of value in twitter that I think is easy to overlook. I think part of the reason people don’t see the value, is that it’s not entirely clear what the value is until you’re following a lot of people on Twitter that you’re actually interested in following (and having at least some of them follow you). That’s when you see this awesome stream of customized news/feedback network come to life. You end up playing a very, very small role in a gigantic real-time stream of constant information (something narcissists won’t be too happy about).
People are already starting to realize that news travels faster on Twitter than most other internet mediums, and those same people are using Twitter primarily for professional reasons. Like me, they’ve discovered that information about (and help from) their field comes to them much faster on Twitter than any other internet medium.
One of the things I miss most about graduate school is the student lounge. At any given moment, I could wonder in and hang out for a bit. You came and went as you pleased, but whenever you were there, someone was there to talk about what you were interested in talking about. Twitter is, as far as I can tell, one of the best virtual philosophy-lounge environments I’ve encountered.
For example, I posted a question about a title for a paper a few days ago. Within a few minutes, I had several replies. (Thanks posiduck, antirealist, rachiestar, PhilGeek, and jichikawa). Today, I was joking about my mail server and within a minute or so was involved in a quick discussion about the semantics of counterfactuals with impossible antecedents.
Here’s another example. I read three tweets today (of no more than 140 characters), and was able to infer the following: jichikawa was supposed to fly from Scotland to Oslo today. He got to the airport and forgot his passport. In his frustration, he tweeted this sad state of affairs. Fortunately, some of his philosopher friends in Scotland follow his tweets. At least one of them, olehjortland, helped him get his passport. Now Ichikawa is safely in Olso, and will deliver his philosophy talk tomorrow at noon.
Nice happy ending, right? I may be wrong about some of the details, but basically Twitter helped a philosopher get his passport and go do some philosophy in Oslo.
Bottomline: Twitter is awesome, and not just for narcissists.
So thank you to all you twittering philosophers.
For those of you who want to follow more philosophers on Twitter, you need to check out John Basl’s list of philosophers of Twitter. He does a good job of updating it regularly. I hope he keeps it up.
I concur!