My primary social network is Twitter, where I can be found as @wisebeck. I joined the site in 2011 after a peer in my MA cohort sang the praises of the backchannel at PCA/ACA, the annual conference of the Popular Culture and American Culture Associations, which we were both presenting at later that year.
Reviewing my Twitter achive in preparation for this badge submission, I was struck by the ease with which I identified patterns in my life with patterns in my tweeting frequency — I’m pretty sure, for example, that this summer’s break in tweeting was largely down to my phone dying and me getting a new, much larger replacement. As I also purchased a smartwatch this summer, that giant phone spends most of its time in my bag — it doesn’t fit in my pockets — and I’m ‘casually online’ a lot less; checking my watch doesn’t afford the same down-the-rabbithole possibilities as checking a fully-functioning tiny computer and digging around in a bag is harder than reaching for a pocket. There’s a smaller phone in my future for that reason.
I tweeted most consistently in the second half of 2014, a semester when I was on fellowship rather than teaching, taking just one course, and really struggling with the demands of my looming field exam (see that little dip in November? That’s when I took the thing). Twitter served then as a way to maintain connections with my peers at UT at a time when I was working almost exclusively from home, and to feel embedded in current conversations when my reading was focussed on historical texts.
Field exam over, I spent December in Australia, where I tweeted up a storm from the Cultural Studies Association of Australia conference (#CSAA14) and was the most prolific tweeter at the event with a combination of panel live-tweets, cross-panel conversation (one instance of which is highlighted in that blog post) and simple organisation. This event was a key networking opportunity for me, as I’m interested in pursuing jobs in the Southern Hemisphere and so need to re/establish a professional profile there. My Twitter encounters turned into in-person ones and led to a couple of ongoing relationships, which I hope will prove helpful next year when I’m on the market.
My Twitter activity is a mix of professional and personal. For the first couple of years, it also served to promote my journalistic writing; as my freelance endeavours have folded or faded, and I’ve become more embedded in digital rhetorics and scholarship, the feed has become more consistently, although far from exclusively, academic. An experiment in fall 2013 with a ‘professional-only/teaching’ Twitter account was an utter bust — not helpful for my students, not fun (or authentic) for me. I’m not currently teaching, so I am not currently working on incorporating Twitter into my pedagogy. However, as a DWRL administrator, I have used my own Twitter account to document and publicise DWRL activities including workshops, public events, and day-to-day activities; this serves to raise the profile of the lab within and outside the university, as well as my own work.
As such, most of my engagement with Twitter is about establishing and maintaining relationships within my two fields of rhetoric and cultural studies — these relationships are both professional and collegial, another rationale for not siloing professional and personal content. The two often collapse together, too — relationships might be forged at conferences, but are often cemented with cute dog content.
Most of my Twitter media is me posting a lot of photos of my dog — which, fittingly given the overall scope of my Twitter feed, sometimes overlaps with my work in the DWRL — and as a result, in what remains my greatest rhetorical accomplishments, have convinced a lot of people that ‘teacup huskies’ are a thing.