Twitter was Good for History
A brief response about Twitter (RIP), History, and Historians
Modern Medieval
by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele
I saw this from Kevin Levin this morning. His piece on his Substack (you should subscribe!) is thought-provoking and clearly comes from a place of deep reflection.
I too find myself increasingly wondering about the role of twitter and (generally - though I could be wrong!) agree that what made the site somehow important is effectively dead - or at the very least will only limp on as a shadow of what it once was.
That said, the thing I don’t agree with is his ultimate conclusions about it being a waste of time for historians and ultimately bad for history (as a discipline). Especially at the beginning of the site’s life, it was a lifeline for me. I was/ am a lone medievalist in Appalachia. For many years, I was literally the only medievalist in the entire university. As such, I had to find intellectual community somewhere else. Twitter quickly became a way of doing just that, of sharing work with medievalists both in the US and across Europe, but also (more importantly) of engaging with other scholars both in history and across disciplines and of engaging with wider publics that simply don’t exist around me.
From a purely professional standpoint, I can point directly to several of my publications and several of my speaking engagements that came directly from me being on Twitter and working with other scholars. From a more personal standpoint, I can point to several people I’ve been able to bring to campus to share with my community and even several friendships that began specifically on the bird site.
Although I’m sure that’s true for others as well, that doesn’t get to the core of Kevin’s critique.
The bigger problem he seems mostly concerned about is related to “history” writ-large. This goes to style and method, and within that (I think) primarily - but not exclusively - fact correction and audience. He writes:
My concern is that as historians have engaged more openly in political disputes online it becomes increasingly difficult to view their scholarship as little more than an extension of their politics. Don’t get me wrong. I am not suggesting that historians should refrain from sharing their political opinions online, but that on a site like Twitter the showcasing of historical knowledge and the sharing of one’s political views look more and more indistinguishable from one another.
This is an old trope that relies upon seeing history as an abundance of objective “facts.” But facts themselves are not objective, nor have they ever been. They’ve always been bound up with “politics” - so much so that it’s mistaken to say that such exist in different categories. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, for example, has convincingly argued that “facts” are made subjective from the moment of their creation, that they contain layers of “silences” around them - what is left out when something else is remembered, and what is marginalized when that remembrance is deployed. This of course doesn’t mean that all “facts” are false but rather that people arguing about meaning or interpretation is the core of history itself, that as David and I write in The Bright Ages “it's always our job to remind people that anyone who offers that type of simplistic narrative is selling something. It's always the historian's job to say 'it's more complicated than that.' Indeed, it is always more complicated than that.”
Certainly, those committed at the margins are not going to - perhaps will never - be persuaded. But as David has said on many occasions, the persuadable are the people who are the lurkers, who are sitting next to those diehards in class. They’re curious and they’re hungry to know about the past, about history. They want to engage but don’t know how. Twitter was, at its best, a true democratic space, one in which anyone could talk to scholars and ask questions, learn about something, find out more.
That’s not a waste of time for history; in fact, it’s the only way forward. As I hope I showed above, public engagement isn’t a faucet that only can be 100% on or 100% off. We can adjust the knobs and even mix the hot and cold to do peer-reviewed work that is later “translated” in short-form for a wider audience, or even be inspired by a shorter public event/ essay that becomes a larger research project. For all its faults, twitter helped scholars begin to see that.
In the end, I don’t know what twitter even is right now, let alone what it’ll become.
But I do know that if we as scholars cede a public space (social media), it’ll be filled by someone. And we won’t like what it’s filled with.
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