Another Day in the Digital Coal Mines

[rynling]

Twitter’s potential collapse could wipe out vast records of recent human history
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/11/1063162/twitters-imminent-collapse-could-wipe-out-vast-records-of-recent-human-history/

Part of what makes Twitter’s potential collapse uniquely challenging is that the “digital public square” has been built on the servers of a private company, says O’Connor’s colleague Elise Thomas, senior OSINT analyst with the ISD. It’s a problem we’ll have to deal with many times over the coming decades, she says: “This is perhaps the first really big test of that.” Twitter’s ubiquity, its adoption by nearly a quarter of a billion users in the last 16 years, and its status as a de facto public archive, has made it a gold mine of information, says Thomas.

I started thinking about this around the summer of 2012, when I realized that LiveJournal was well and truly on its way out. I was working on my dissertation, and I was coming up against the fact that a lot of the progressive literary movements I was trying to describe got started on LiveJournal before moving elsewhere (usually to Twitter). Like, you can't talk about Roxanne Gay or N. K. Jemisin without talking about LiveJournal. Understanding that all of these conversations were in danger of vanishing caused me to realize that one of the most valuable things I could do with my work was to try to preserve and explain as many of these digital artifacts as I could.

So, for about ten years, the point of my academic writing was this:

(1) Identify and select samples from a large and persistent online conversation
(2) Explain why this conversation is interesting, and who is involved
(3) Put this conversation into a broader social context
(4) Explain why this is important to public discourse

I like to think I'm a decent writer and scholar, and I'm not attacking anyone or saying anything offensive, but I received an absurd amount of pushback. It was intense, and it only got worse as I built my career.

I think the major problem is that I was focused on emergent conversations. A lot of the online conversations that "serious people" care about fit into pre-existing narratives: People care about #MeToo because feminism is a pre-existing story, people care about #BLM because the Civil Rights Movement is a pre-existing story, people care about the war in Ukraine because "Russia is evil" is a pre-existing story, etc.

But what if it's something like transgender rights or disability activism? These aren't new movements by any means, but we don't yet have a large historical narrative that establishes them as weighty matters.

But they are, of course! An entire generation of people saying "gender is constructed, and I choose my own pronouns" is going to have repercussions, as is the generation of people who found the courage to celebrate different body types and neurotypes immediately preceding and during a global pandemic that brought these issues to everyone's attention in a major way. Because it's difficult to document Twitter conversations after they've passed, you really have to document them as they're ongoing. This requires a ton of work, but I think it's important. These large historical narratives have to come from somewhere, after all, and I think Twitter is (was?) a major part of this process.

But I don't do this anymore. It was so weird to be intellectually invested in a multilingual Cultural Studies project of excavating the "digital dark age" and then read a review of my book in which a grown adult graduate student complains that the plot of Sailor Moon is difficult to follow. And then, when you say this isn't a fair critique and should have received some sort of editorial feedback, other grad students get on Twitter to call you an autistic freakshow who wasn't raped enough as a child. Looks like someone needs a lobotomy. Do everyone a favor and die of cancer.

I guess what I'm saying is that while it's important to create archives, it's also important to understand and respect the work of people who use these archives. You can preserve all the data you want, but that doesn't mean much if the work of the people who excavate and explain this data isn't treated as legitimate scholarship that's worthy of support.

Comments

[lassarina]

Honestly my knee-jerk reaction to this was "of course they don't think it's important, it's not By, For, and About Powerful or Successfully Iconoclastic Men." But just maybe I am a tiny bit bitter about how my field is endlessly interpreted through the lens of Important Men Doing Important Man-Things and All Through That Lens.