Comments on: Tweet Away

By: bill benzon

bill benzon — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 08:38:14 +0000

It’s well known that the sound of philosophers tweeting is exactly like that of angels dancing on the heads of pins. THAT’s why Leiter disapproves. The tweets mess up his count.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 15:11:48 +0000

In reply to Johnson. I don't typically moderate comments, but please let's not have any more of that.

By: Johnson

Johnson — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 14:56:28 +0000

philosophically speaking, he sounds like a ****

By: Jason Mittell

Jason Mittell — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 14:30:44 +0000

Presumably Leiter is equally opposed to quotations, which must similarly mutilate an argument by excerpting it into a smaller chunk. And don’t get him started on paraphrasing…

By: Western Dave

Western Dave — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 13:08:00 +0000

I just don’t get Leiter’s position at all. And the neoliberal thing? Clearly someone is having prelapsarian visions of academia. I started using Twitter in earnest at American Society of Environmental History in Madison last March. I presented in the first session and somebody tweeted it, it showed up in my feed. It made my conference much more productive, I met a bunch of cool people I wouldn’t have otherwise met, and I still have my notes (along with lots of other people’s) because the organizers archived everything that used the conference hashtag. In general, a much better experience than my 90s and 2000 era conferences.

By: j.

j. — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 02:36:55 +0000

tim, you don’t not understand nothing. (ha!)

it’s just the same old preening professional academic prejudice. leiter’s papers are just the kinds of papers you’ve heard anywhere. ‘here’s a thing. here are some views. they are wrong. here’s my view.’ they don’t require great feats of understanding, they’re just designed for a format in which an author literally reads out a paper to a docile audience in a setting in which the professional ethos would have everyone involved try to completely undermine the author’s reasoning by asking him questions after a five to ten minute break period, and any form of response which is not more or less effective toward that goal – for example, because it does not restrict itself to pointing out flaws in the author’s reasoning or removing support for any of his assertions – is ruled out of bounds as either inadmissible or as a failure to appreciate the norms by which serious philosophers conduct themselves.

also, the rhetorical ethos of leiter’s blog is different from that of his professional papers. he vents and opines and sneers in various ways which he seems not to take that seriously, although he will occasionally intermix lower-tier professional work in with it (so, running polls about professional controversies, reforms to practices, etc.), where he does actually seem to be serious. the non-serious posts are offered under the aspect of ‘humor’, although he’s rarely as humorous as he seems to think. in the same way the ‘critique’ you get in things like this does not seem to me to be especially incisive.

By: Rohan Maitzen

Rohan Maitzen — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 00:42:37 +0000

Yeah, well, his clarification makes no particular sense to me either. When someone tweets about a presentation or paper in any field, they are going to do it a bit at a time. It becomes ‘extended’ only across the series. Philosophical arguments are often, in fact, made up of highly specific discrete steps (my husband’s an analytic philosopher, so I’ve proofread more than my share of philosophy papers) so there’s no reason at all why they could not be shared via Twitter as well if not better than papers in other disciplines. Really this seems like just another example of someone who doesn’t use (or hasn’t figure out how to use) a particular tool making assumptions about how it works — or, in his case, how it doesn’t work.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 22:58:19 +0000

Yeah, I’m afraid he’s quite serious on this sort of point–repeatedly so.

In his clarification, he says, “It’s because philosophy can’t be tweeted.” Unlike, of course, other disciplines which are sufficiently stupid, I would guess.

As a non-philosopher, I suppose I do not fully understand how the DEEP THINKING that happens when a philosopher reads a paper at the major professional meetings is so fundamentally incommunicable that only another act of lengthy DEEP THINKING could possibly remark upon it.

I especially do not understand how this is compatible with having a blog about philosophy that communicates in posts that are not full philosophical papers about matters of concern to philosophers. But I’m sure I don’t understand this because I am not a philosopher. If I were, I would!

By: Rohan Maitzen

Rohan Maitzen — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 20:04:17 +0000

I saw Leiter’s post and thought surely he was being ironic. But then I dug up this previous post which does suggest he could indeed be serious:

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2012/01/the-uses-of-twitter.html