Guerrilla Composition on Twitter: Writing for the Apocalypse
By Kimberly L. Leifer
A thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Auburn University at Montgomery in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Teaching Writing Program
Montgomery, Alabama
30 November 2017 COPYRIGHT
© 2017
Kimberly L. Leifer All rights reserved ABSTRACT
GUERRILLA COMPOSITION ON TWITTER: WRITING FOR THE APOCALYPSE
by
Kimberly L. Leifer
Auburn University at Montgomery, 2017 Under the Supervision of Dr. Elizabeth D. Woodworth and Dr. K. Shannon Howard
The world is changing faster than ever before, and with those changes comes uncertainty and insecurity. Apocalyptic thought is brought to life in books and movies; the end-of-the-world trope has been publicized and capitalized upon for years. Along with the common theme of zombies in these apocalyptic works are the small communities of survivors, conducting guerrilla warfare in order to survive.
Per definition, an apocalypse is less about zombies and more about changing perspectives in and of the world, lifting the veil to the truth of reality. The guerrilla fighters are waging their little wars on the digital battlefields of social media. The power of social media is one to be harnessed and taught in the academy, to allow students to engage with and better understand the world around them.
i Acknowledgements
To my husband, Chris: Thank you is too simple. None of this could have happened without your love, your humor, and your support.
I'd also like to thank my thesis director, Dr. Elizabeth Woodworth for your guidance.
Your ability to ask just the right questions at the right times is a gift. My thanks to Dr. Shannon
Howard, my second reader, and one of the best stage managers I've ever gotten to work with.
Both of you have encouraged me in different ways to explore and take chances, and I am forever grateful for the experience.
Thanks also to Sabrina Hyppolite, for your friendship and never ending source of cheering gifs and emojis.
And finally, thanks to Juanita Barrett, for the discussion that started all of this.
ii Table of Contents
Acknowledgements...... ii
Chapter 1: Guerrilla Composition and the Apocalypse...... 1
Chapter 2: Twitter, Tweeple, and the Twitterverse...... 23
Chapter 3: Twitter and Guerrilla Composition in the Classroom...... 70
Epilogue: Back to the Beginning...... 67
Works Cited...... 72
Appendix A -- Literacy Narrative Assignment...... 77
iii 1
Chapter 1
Guerrilla Composition and the Apocalypse
The revolution will be live. —Gil Scott-Heron, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Guerrilla means “little war,” and represents the individual fighter in an independent body of skirmishers. Modern media has portrayed guerrilla warfare as being conducted by small groups of almost savage people, bent on the death and destruction of a larger, usually government led, force. Pop culture has often romanticized images of these small groups of people, calling them Freedom Fighters. The infamous image of Che Guevara is silk-screened on t-shirts, which are worn by people who have no idea who he was. Star Wars and Firefly are other icons that represent this romantic view of guerrillas.
Instead of accepting the pop culture image of guerrilla combat, I propose to consider not the violence or reasons behind the revolutionary actions, but the tactics of these small units. I learned small group tactics in the military, usually as part of unit building activities. The difference between mainstream organizations and guerrilla units, the military, and the classroom, is a matter of size and permanence. In this case, all three non-permanent units are pretty close to the same size; a platoon in the Army is roughly 20-30 people. A guerrilla unit would have to be small for ease of movement. My own classes are capped at 20 students. Permanence across all three varies, and in the case of the academy, a standard semester runs 15-16 weeks. That’s only
40 hours of instruction time, given a standard 3 credit hour class. This isn’t a lot of time to work on the tactics of composition, especially with students who come from different cultures, belief systems, and educational advantages.
In reality, the things I learned aren’t that much different than what guerrillas learn as far 2 as movements, cohesion, and specifically, communication. All organizations, large and small, have their own language; their own discourse. This language shapes the very being of an organization, which, in turn, affects how it is seen from the outside. In their own ways, the guerrilla, the military, and the classroom use language to effect change; the military seeks control, the academy seeks knowledge, and the the guerrilla seeks to disrupt. All of these entities have the ability to upset and destroy the status quo, paving the way for change at all levels of power.
An apocalypse is commonly thought to be a cataclysmic event, as seen with the popular zombie apocalypse tropes, with stories of an accidentally-intentional global release of a Top
Secret Superbug, which renders most of the population undead, leaving civilization in tatters, and the only reality is survival. I suggest going back to an older definition, in use prior to the mid-
19th century. Per that earlier definition, an apocalypse is the uncovering or disclosing of a thing, a lifting of the veil. Hyung-jun Moon, in his dissertation, writes, “In other words, apocalypse can function as a conceptual tool that projects an imaginative catastrophic event onto a reality, through which questions of political, economic, social, and cultural problems of the present era can be raised, thought, and answered” (4). It is an ongoing revelation, not an end destination. An apocalypse is a process that guides new thought and create new knowledge, and those who undertake that process, even contribute to it, can be seen as guerrillas.
Once the fiction of the zombie is cut out, and the realization that civilization does not function at a high level, as seen by current socio-political rhetoric, and a need for action is acknowledged, we are left with a blank slate. Reality becomes something to create anew, and dialogue, rather than capitalistic class based systems, can become a valuable commodity. This 3 idea seemingly goes against the nature of people. In Letters for the Living: Teaching Writing in a Violent Age by Michael Blitz and C. Mark Hurlbert, they attempt to do just that, create dialogue across cultural and state lines. Through a series of letters, they discuss the apocalypses of their students, half from rural, coal mining country, the other half from the inner city, and of their shared world of violence, of which they say, “Ours is a society that tolerates violence more and more as a natural part of life and sees peace more and more as an abstraction. The teaching of writing is connected to living. Not living in the abstract, but living— and dying” (1).
Violence has become normalized, and people are largely desensitized to it, largely because of mainstream media. Blitz and Hurlbert suggest that “someone is always watching.
Before long, it no longer matters that anyone is watching because everyone is watching and no one is noticing” (12). The constant influx of negativity, and the speed at which it is delivered has inoculated people against the severity of the situation. Whether our world has actually become more violent or just seems that way is up for debate; there are bodies of research that lend themselves to the idea that violence is not on the uprise, and others that contradict this. What is agreed upon is that journalism and the media play a large part in this perception, which has become the reality. In Letters for the Living, they say that “the easiest thing is to forget that you have to make peace. Maybe the second easiest thing to do, in this regard, is to fail to notice or to pay attention to the moments of peace when they happen” (58). Violence sells; apocalyptic thought sells more.
If we really are looking at a post-apocalyptic turn in composition, that means the veil has been lifted, per Paul Lynch’s (and Webster’s) definition of apocalypse (459). What we are seeing in the world are truths as people see them, and whereas, “in the pre-modern era, the concept of 4 apocalypse referred to the end of the world as an imminent actuality, in the modern era it has come to mean the immanent existence of a life shaped by crises” (Moon 3-4). We need to get beyond that, to the kernels of thought from which personal truths have grown, and figure out how to engage from that point. If we start listening instead of arguing, we can change how we look at composing. As Lynch put it, “A composition should no longer be judged by how incisively it debunks, but instead by how expansively (and perhaps “sloppily”) it puts together”
(470). Making arguments is not effective anymore, instead, we need to look at the world as is, accept our part in the creation of the mess, and work toward solutions. We can stop being reactionary, and work on being contemplative. It is not enough to simply see the apocalypse, but we should also see our roles within it, and through modern means of composition, try to find equilibrium.
Communication on the Internet is what combines both guerrilla warfare and the apocalypse. For my purposes, and because warfare brings about an image of combat in which there is a winner and loser, I have chosen to adopt the idea of guerrilla composition as it relates to the way people interact online in Twitter. Composition, in its most simple form, is about communication. In our current social and political spheres, this communication is changing and dividing in such a way that creating understanding is all but impossible. Lynch, also discussing
Blitz and Hurlburt on this subject of how we can change our pedagogical practices to suit this cultural shift, “suggests that the crisis that has occasioned the apocalyptic turn: the world is in such a state that our usual ways of talking, writing, and teaching no longer cut it” (460). The direction to turn for the answers, I believe, lies in technology and in embracing the new forms of communication available to all of us. 5
Today, there are many veils being lifted, and we have the Internet to thank for that. Open and immediate communication has been a blessing and a curse over the last 20 years, and while there is plenty of scholarship1 out there concerning the use of the Internet in the academy, we are still learning how to work with it. Much of the time, however, it seems that our efforts are in vain; we are swimming against the stream of constant “new and improved” software and applications, and as soon as people get used to one, it is replaced with another. Some of these platforms adapt and endure, and will become the central focus of Chapter 2.
With these definitions in mind, and a focus on the global climate in terms of social and political welfare, class systems, and communication, I turn toward the academy as a whole.
Higher education is going through its own apocalypse. The Pew Research Center recently conducted a study on the perception that the two major political parties have about the university system. While both believe that higher education is important to prepare students for good employment, the Republican Party is increasingly negative about the overall impact of higher education on the country. This impression has increased at an alarming rate, over a short period of time; from 37 to 58% disapproval rating in just two years (Fingerhut).
This decline is a long time in the making. Richard E. Miller, author of Writing at the End of the World said,
For those who study the job market in higher education, it is clear that we are at the
twilight of the profession as we have known it: the declining tax base, the rise of
animosity for education as a kind of “social engineering,” the steady replacement of
1 A few of these scholars make an appearance here: Jeff Grabill, danah boyd, and the staff and contributors of Kairos. 6
tenured lines with temporary workers, the encroachment of total quality management and
outcomes assessment, and the public cries for tangible evidence of the “products” of
education have all served to change what it means to be a teacher in the academy and
what it means to be a graduate student training for entry into this profession (169).
The Pew Research Center study is a little vague on the percentage of Republicans with degrees vs. without and the percentages of each that answered in the negative about education. It is seemingly those without four year degrees who are the most disenfranchised about the university system (Fingerhut). Conversely, it is the Democratic party that has increased negativity in regards to religious organizations and churches (Fingerhut). There is a growing chasm between ideology and the academy. What does this all mean?
There is a breakdown in communication. I am not proposing that it is along political party lines, though research skews to this being a correct narrative. Instead, I wish to turn the narrative back to the earlier days of the university system, days we have not gotten fully away from.
Over the last few years, I have become increasingly interested in the academy’s treatment of English, specifically the treatment of dialects that do not conform to the notions of academic
English, or standard written English. This rigid discourse, a product of a few hundred years of
Colonialism and racial division is the standard by which all writing in universities across the
United States is judged, often to the detriment of the students, the near-majority of which fall under non-privileged categories. Class structure and the misconceptions therein also add to this narrative of failure, creating situations in the classroom that can be hostile to the very students we claim to want to reach. 7
Blitz and Hurlbert are more succinct: “Schools are like poorly made nets. We catch a few
—the easily caught ones—and then we don’t know what to do with them. We sure don’t know what to do about all the ones that get away. But we keep replacing the net because we cannot imagine any other thing to do” (50). The academy has been fighting this battle, to varying degrees of success, for three quarters of a century now. Globalization and the Internet have added new challenges to the field of Composition. Peter Elbow says, “In our college and university classrooms, we find an unprecedented number of speakers of non-mainstream dialects and students for whom English is a second language…historical situations like these, then, can fuel desires to preserve the standard or accepted prestige language intact—to keep it from being misused, debased, corrupted” (Inviting 360). While we’ve seen improvement in a lot of areas, our current political climate certainly doesn’t help the situation, either, and while the same discussion has been ongoing for decades now, if changes aren’t enacted, the progress that has been made could potentially be lost.
Instead of dismissing conversations in the world because of the apparent lack of intellectual prowess, we should embrace the richness and versatility of our written language. The gap between the intellectual elite and the anti-intellectual movement isn’t going away, and is, in fact, getting broader. All sides have much to say, and really aren’t that different in goals and passions, but the obstinacy of the academy, unless brought into check, will make a chasm so great, that class divides will become more firmly cemented than they already are. As Irvin
Peckham says in Going North, Thinking West, “Writing is a fundamental act of literacy, of naming the world and writing one’s way into it” (1).
We need to encourage people to compose their truths, to embrace literacy, and to join 8 global conversations. This practice goes beyond the humanities, beyond the academy to a place where shared experience “is not about admiration or greatness or appreciation or depth of knowledge or scholarly achievement; it’s about the movement between worlds, arms out, balancing; it’s about making the connections that count” (Miller 198).
This is not to say that we need to forgo learning and teaching academic discourse altogether. It is important that people learn the language of the academy, because as stated earlier, it is the way of communication within that organization. Learning this language opens up possibilities on a global scale, by training the individual mind to think creatively as well as critically.
Instead, we need to focus on continuing to encourage writing as a means of expression and thinking, of learning and transfer of knowledge, and of inclusion. In order to do that, we need to recognize our failings, and attempt to understand why we are having difficulties breaking the cycle.
While failure is often discussed in the field of Composition, it is usually in relation to the student, not the instructor. Composition instructors are thought to fail to live up to the expectations of the University by not teaching students to write in every discipline across the curriculum, which has sparked a long standing debate over the function of Composition to begin with, and ends with English departments standing off against every other department on campus.
Even within our own English departments, the function of Composition is questionable. There are those who firmly believe that composition is all about English, and serves Literature. Then there are those who believe that Composition is a field unto itself, involving the art of writing persuasively, and engaging in the deep thinking required to produce such works. In the end, it 9 doesn’t matter what side a person stands on, it is the field that takes the brunt of the failure, and inevitably, the students who bear the heaviest load.
Some students bear a heavier load than the rest. Students who are marginalized, those often left on the fringes, are the ones who suffer the most, and it begins in childhood: “With few exceptions, the children from the black working class were energetic, loved, and eager learners in their home communities, but by the time they had (or hadn’t) finished primary schools, they had settled into the failure narrative” (Peckham 6-7). Of course, this doesn’t apply to just black students (or other persons of color), but also those for whom English is a second language, or people who, for whatever reason did not have the ability to obtain the basic education necessary to be successful in college. One of the biggest tells of this lack of success is in writing—it’s also a good means to track marginalization in primary schools. Peckham notes that “In some cases, writing leads to knowledge, but in others, it is one of the best ways of sorting people” (2). If this sounds vaguely Marxist, it is. Humans categorize everything, especially other people. We are all sorted into groups based on relationship, to include race, gender, and geography. Peckham says it well: “among industrialized societies, in particular, these relationships are characterized by a hierarchical distribution of wealth, status, and privilege. Some groups at the top of the hierarchy receive significantly more wealth, status, and privilege than those at the bottom” (2). This means of sorting, whether we like it or not, goes back to Colonialism and the idea that the “other” was lesser than the white European. We know this now, and our studies of Marx and others bear fruit that is oftentimes bitter to swallow.
These problems aren’t new. Mina Shaughnessy was writing about this in the 70’s. David
Bartholomae has spent his career working with basic writers and studying the process. In “The 10
Tidy House: Basic Writing in the American Curriculum,” Bartholomae said of his first teaching experience, “I knew from the first week that I was going to fail them; in fact I knew that I was going to preside over a curriculum that spent 14 weeks slowly and inevitably demonstrating their failures” (313). I must question the use of “their failures” in this statement. Of course,
Bartholomae did not make the mistakes for his students, but are the students themselves to bear sole blame for them, or is it possible that some of the weight of those errors should be on the shoulders of the school systems that were supposed to support them prior to the university?
I am not, of course, suggesting that every student is an “A” student, nor am I saying that students bear no responsibility for their education, but when school systems are being reported as failing, as seen here in Alabama recently, it does bear consideration that there is a problem far greater than the student. Peckham mirrors Bartholomae’s statement, and lends credence to the thought that schools are a large part of the problem: “I used to think that education institutions functioned to encourage students to learn. I now see them as functioning in part to create failure.
The primary agency of failure is language” (1-2).
While there is not much that instructors can do to mitigate the effects of poor primary education at the source, we are still tasked with the job of educating these students and trying to bring them up to a standard that they are unaware of, much less prepared to meet. This task is not without its hazards, even at the university level. From the days of open enrollment in the 70’s, to now, we create courses designed to help marginalized students “catch up” to their peers.
Bartholomae says, “Basic writers are produced by our desires to be liberals—to enforce a commonness among our students by making the differences superficial, surface-level, and by designing a curriculum to both insure them and erase them in 14 weeks” (318). Bartholomae 11 instead proposes a different stance, citing Mary Louise Pratt’s discussion of “contact zones,” to create a program “designed not to hide differences (by sorting bodies) but to highlight them, to make them not only the subject of the writing curriculum, but the source of its goals and values
(at least one of the versions of writing one can learn at the university)” (319). The change must come from the top, and it must be inclusive, not exclusive.
Ignoring topics of race, class, gender, sexuality, and the other topics that are in the news isn’t the answer. Refusing to have discussions about these things is akin to refusing to acknowledge the differences exist. Clarification on what Pratt terms “contact zones,” is taken from her keynote address at a conference in 1990: “I use this term to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (34). Over the last decade or so, perhaps more so than any other time since open enrollment began in universities, we are seeing firsthand the contact zones in our classrooms, the media, and the world. While we cannot control the outside world, we can control what happens in our classrooms, and up until now, “the American classroom has been a place where we cannot talk about race or class or the history of the American classroom”
(Bartholomae 318). We do have to endeavor to help our students communicate outside of the classroom as well; they will quickly be expected to function in an increasingly hostile world. In the age of “alt-facts,” we have to engage in this dialogue, and we must do it in plain, clear language. Preparing our students for contact zones in the safety of a classroom will help them navigate outside of the academy.
Bringing the outside world into our classrooms and helping students to navigate from 12 within will help prepare them even more. Blitz and Hurlbert have another view, which lends itself more to a balance of life inside and outside of the academy, one where “the discipline of rhetoric and composition teaches how to value personal writing, forms of exposition and argument, and how to regard our students’ writings as linguistic, rhetorical, and cultural events”
(21).
There is a balance to this. In an op-ed piece in The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino takes aim at the over-sharing, navel-gazing types of essays that permeate the web, “a specific sort of ultra- confessional essay, written by a person you’ve never heard of and published online, that flourished until recently” (Tolentino). This sensationalist writing, the type with clickbait style headlines, was born out of early social media, through sites like Livejournal, Blogger, and the even earlier Geocities. This is not the type of writing that brings people together, rather, it’s sensationalistic and viral, only meant to make money. This is not the balance outside of the academy that fosters composition or communication within.
Much of the divisive nature of communication is political. John Bean, author of
Exchanging Ideas, discusses language politics: “Some persons, such as those seeking higher social status, want to expurgate all vestiges of their home dialects in order to speak (and write) standard English. Others resist standard English as a badge of pride, defiance, and social identity” (71). Humor aside, he makes a good point. Well meaning people say things like, “He’s so well spoken,” in an attempt at being welcoming, but the effect is the opposite, and is often offensive, as though the “well spoken” person is using language that does not belong to them, but merely adopted. Peckham notes that “Language is a particularly effective mechanism for maintaining distinctions among social classes because it functions both to communicate and 13 signal identity, with one function frequently disguised as the other” (28). While sight cues provide instant information as to race—correct or not— and gender—again, correct or not— the vocal cues give even more information as to a person’s social standing or where they might come from. An accent becomes a means to categorize an individual, not based on intellectual ability, but solely by virtue of how well spoken a person sounds.
These categories only hurt humanity. If we are dismissive of a person based on how they sound, we could very well miss out on something important that they have to say. In his foreword to Dialects, Englishes, Creoles, and Education by Shondel J. Nero, Elbow says,
“Language prejudice runs startlingly deep—in some ways deeper than racial prejudice. When I encounter tolerant people who are remarkable for their openness to dangerous ideas and wrong practices that mainstream society rejects—people who above all sincerely reject racism—I find that a good number of them are deeply intolerant of language they call wrong or bad. They welcome all people and ideas—as long as they are “well spoken” (Margins ix). I have been guilty of this prejudice as well; my acknowledgment and admission, along with this research, is the path to my own change.
I feel like Elbow did when he said, “On the one hand, I feel an obligation not to force all my students to conform to the language and culture of mainstream English. On the other hand, I feel an obligation to give all my students access to the written language of power and prestige”
(Inviting 359). It’s a precarious balance, wanting students to give life and meaning to their writing, but having to keep them reigned in so as to help them learn the dialects of the academy and the professional world. In my efforts to overcome my own prejudices of language, I again turn to Elbow and answer his question, “Should teachers and citizens recognize that the various 14 dialects, Englishes, and creoles we find around us—widely felt as wrong, broken, and bad—are in fact full of valid sophisticated languages?” (Margins ix) with an emphatic yes. I go further and say that we should work toward embracing them widely.
One of the problems of maintaining such a strict standard of communication is the lack of growth in the language we profess to study. Other than the creation of words to fit with new inventions,the language of the academy remains rigid and unyielding; it’s only been within the last few years that the singular “they” has been widely accepted, and even then, there are plenty of instructors who refuse to allow for this type of “error.” This is where the erasing that
Bartholomae mentioned above happens. Peckham notes that “Teachers, for example, may correct working-class students’ deviations from the conventions of middle-class English, telling the students that the errors make their writing difficult to understand when in fact the teachers are correcting social class behavior manifested through language codes” (28). We discuss higher and lower order concerns with our students, citing structure as higher order, but then attempt to erase their identities in the name of said structure, mistakenly calling it error. The difference here, is that it is the teacher, not the student, who must be cognizant of their social biases when it comes to grading students’ work. We need to remember that just because something is not phrased in a way that we might phrase it, doesn’t mean that it’s an error, only that it’s worded differently.
This habit is a dangerous one to get into. Of error, Bartholomae has this to say:
If errors—errors of syntax, errors in word choice, errors of judgment—can be seen as
evidence of student’s attempts to approximate the language of a more privileged group
(of those who speak and write freely at the university, for example), then it may not be at 15
all appropriate to point to an error and say, “Don’t do that.” To say that is to say “Don’t
do more than you can do,” a directive that will most likely be taken for exactly what it
represents by students who are excluded from the mainstream of university life. “Don’t
make mistakes,” “Don’t use jargon,” “Be simple and direct”—all of these phrases quickly
translate into “Don’t try to be what you are not” or, more succinctly, “Go away” (39).
If we consider Elbow’s words on language prejudice, and apply vigilance in how we frame our critiques to our students, we can avoid unspoken translations like Bartholomae’s examples. This is not to say that we have to treat our students with kid gloves or tiptoe around them, but we cannot simply say “don’t do that” without having further conversation about the
“that” in question. We know that students should never be left guessing why they are being admonished and what they are being admonished for. They need specifics so they can learn about all these high and low order concerns we throw about as though they are common knowledge.
Instead of “don’t do that,” we should be making suggestions as to what to do, giving concrete examples and reading them out loud to students so they can hear the difference in meaning.
“Maybe you could try this,” and “how does this sound?” are far more appropriate suggestions to make; this gives the student some agency as to their own choices instead of their being overpowered by marks on a paper.
Perhaps it’s time to encourage our students to find their own style. Bean agrees, saying that “We should note that much of what constitutes “error” really involves stylistic choices— issues of rhetorical effectiveness and grace rather than right-or-wrong adherence to rules” (75).
Insofar as something written conveys what the student meant to say, and is understandable, we 16 need to learn to leave well enough alone and let them find their own voices. We should not teach them to mimic ours, to do so also sends the message that they do not belong. In the event that a student’s does need correction, well beyond lower order concerns, Bean’s advice is helpful: “My stance as a composition teacher is to empower students to make their own decisions about social embarrassment by describing very clearly those language practices that cause embarrassment in different rhetorical contexts and by giving them the power to avoid unintentional errors in whatever dialect their audience expects” (72). In this way, we are giving students the tools to appropriately communicate with different audiences, and showing them how to identify those audiences to begin with.
Helping students find their academic voices, to step into the discourse community, is what we are here to do. We are not the gatekeepers into a successful academic career, but guides to show them that learning to write well takes effort and perseverance. We need to use language that does not tell them to go away, or that they are appropriating a culture in which they will forever be seen as outsiders, because it simply isn’t true. Composition instructors focus on the process, and on the basic sharing of ideas and communication. A good deal of our time in the classroom is often spent on exploratory writing, that which helps students figure out what they want to say. Bean says that “Worrying about spelling, grammar, and structure when you are trying to discover and clarify ideas can shut down any writer’s creative energy. Exploratory writing is messy because thought is messy. Rather than junk writing, then, a better analogy for exploratory writing might be an architect’s sketchbook of possible designs for a project or even a fertile patch of land sprouting with seeds” (125). With more and more classrooms being equipped with technology, instructors are working toward being more creative with the ways that 17 students can explore. Social media venues, like Twitter, allow for concentrated exploration and thesis development by limiting space, but not ideas. Places like Tumblr allow for true multi- modality, in that students can combine text with imagery and sound in countless configurations to create full, rich compositions. As Composition instructors, we should engage widely with the tools that the Internet has to offer, but we cannot afford to forget our analogue beginnings.
Nor can we forget our primary purpose in Composition, which is to help students learn to write with clarity and awareness, and in ways that will help them both in the university and outside of it. We cannot, nor should we even try to teach our students to write in every community. According to Bartholomae, we have to let the student join our class and “learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community. Or perhaps I should say the various discourses of our community, since it is in the nature of a liberal arts education that a student, after the first year or two, must learn to try on a variety of voices”
(60).
I’m not advocating the abandonment of English conventions. I am proposing that we embrace the possibilities of the English language. We spend considerable time and effort thinking critically about works of literature and historical events, poring over language usage and pondering the word choices that famous, long-dead authors (as well as plenty of living ones) have made. We analyze and over-analyze, and then write, in the most stuffy of terms, essays about these very same works. These essays are devoid of personality, choosing not to pay homage to the works they are about, but to exist as more of a dirge. They are clean and sterile, full of whatever catch phrases are de rigeur in the field at any given time. This is the language 18 that is creating much of the division between the academy and the outside world. The inaccessibility of our language is, in part, what is making it difficult for the humanities to maintain relevance in a world focused on the STEM fields. We have to address this, and to be clear on where Composition fits in to the greater picture. Instead of being exclusionary, the field should catch up with and engage the discourse communities outside the walls of the academy, and to bring them in to the classroom. Perhaps it is time, as has been suggested, for Composition departments to exist as equals with the English departments, and as not subordinates.
To do so means going outside of the traditional classroom to examine where raw, open composition happens. I want to examine guerrilla tactics, those temporary communities we see on the Internet, specifically Twitter, and consider how to branch out to and into those writing spaces and see how they are addressing the issues that we are facing in the world today, issues that our students need to be prepared to, through their writing, critically and creatively meet. 19
Chapter 2
Twitter, Tweeple, and the Twitterverse
And the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls. —Simon and Garfunkel, Sounds of Silence
Twitter is guerrilla composition. As a whole, Twitter is a web of user driven content and conversation that comes together in ever-increasing circles of social connection. If there is a niche, people are talking about it on Twitter. If there is a mainstream topic, it’s on Twitter. It’s compact and efficient; people around the world have used it in times of strife and violence as well as times of sorrow and coming together. This user driven content is guerrilla composition.
These are compositions that exist in the world outside of the academy. Among the people who create this content are professors, researchers, and the students who are trying to adapt to and inhabit multiple discourse communities simultaneously.
Twitter came into being on 21 March 2006, with “just setting up my twttr” as the first message sent by co-founder Jack Dorsey (Lifewire). It was touted as a microblogging service, filling a niche that had been yet unexplored in the adolescence of social media.
As with most blogging and social media sites, Twitter allows for customization. Users
(sometimes called Tweeps, Tweeple, and the tongue-in-cheek Twits) are able to fill in their names, locational data, personal websites, profile pictures, background pictures, and interests. All of these categories help users to find each other. Hashtags are also found in the Bio section, further enhancing searchability.
There are two usage conventions that weren’t started in Twitter, but make it wholly unique to any other platform. The hashtag and at symbols, # and @, respectively, weren’t part of the first iteration of Twitter, but were developed by users as a means to create dialog and tag each 20 other.
The integration of these symbols by the developers at Twitter fit into the scheme of people effecting change. Utilizing a tool for all manner of composition and communication, adapting it for further use, and then having those changes made a part of the program itself shows aspects of guerrilla thought, though without predetermined tactics involved.
The @ symbol was originally used in Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a simple, text-based chat program that allows users to create chat rooms based on any criteria. Using the @ symbol along with the username allowed people to send private messages to each other. Twitter, in its infancy, had no way for users to address each other’s tweets in any meaningful, conversational way. As more people started using the @username convention, Twitter made the usage part of the inner coding of the system. Now, using the @ allows people to receive notification of tweets, retweets, and direct mentions. Common syntax in conversation includes the @symbol as a means of direct address, which isn’t confined grammatically to the beginning of a sentence, but can be used throughout a statement.
The characteristic that sets Twitter apart from other social media and blogging services is the limitations of the medium. Tweets are limited to 1402 characters because Twitter was originally designed to be used on the mobile phone Short Message Service (SMS), more popularly known as text messages. As Twitter grew in popularity on the web, and more people started using it in browser form, the constraint stayed in place, begetting the term,
2 As soon as I began revision, Twitter increased the character count of tweets from 140 characters to 280. Among the academics I follow, this has not been a popular change. In fact, most tweets I’ve noticed have continued to stay within the 140 character limits. Whether that is because of habit or a conscious choice is unknown. I am not pleased with this change; doubling character count removes a great deal of what makes Twitter an intriguing place. People no longer need to plan as carefully what they want to say, and how they want their message to come across. 21
“Microblogging.”
One of the more subtle details on Twitter is the use of a guiding question in the area where tweets are composed. The use of the question isn’t unique to Twitter, but has been adapted and used across a number of social media programs. I noticed the questions on Facebook, or rather, my response to those questions. A few years ago, Facebook incorporated the feature “On
This Day” to show people what they had typed on any particular calendar day throughout the entire time they have been on the site. My earlier responses, as well as those of my friends, were disjointed sentence fragments, based around the question, “What are you doing?” The questions were typed in a text box that following the user’s name, which was automatically appended to the beginning of the status. Visitors to a profile would see updates like, “Kim is taking a nap.” or other random bits from everyday life. Because the person’s name was automatically added to the beginning of the status, it forced users to be creative with their updates, lest they have grammatically awkward sentences. In this way, Facebook controlled the conversation at the outset.
Twitter used the same question, except they did not automatically add usernames on the tweets. This allowed people to start ignoring the question, which allowed them to start conversing and composing more. Instead of pictures of meals and tweets about the absolute minutiae of daily life, the practice of which was widely mocked as banal and narcissistic, people began to reach out to other people. Users around the world were talking with each other instead of at each other. In November 2009, Twitter changed their status question to “What’s happening?”
Biz Stone, one of the co-founders of Twitter, explained that while many might answer 22
“What are you doing?” in the literal sense, what Twitter had become was “not exclusively about these personal musings” (Stone). The open model of Twitter, he went on to say, had “long outgrown the concept of personal status updates” (Stone) and acknowledged that the slight change really wouldn’t change how people had adapted the medium to their needs, but mused that it might make the platform easier to explain. Regardless of the flippancy Stone expressed with the change, there is still something to it. The psychological ramifications of these two statements is subtle, but distinct. The first, “What are you doing?” is a self-important question. It encourages the individual to answer literally and superficially. The new question, “What’s happening?” is the opposite. While it gives the individual a chance to be introspective as to what they are doing, it also provides an outlet for that person to place themselves in the middle of greater action. It also, more importantly, gives the person agency to discuss more global happenings and share their viewpoints on them. This change has helped Twitter to evolve into something that transcends a social media platform into a real-time global conversation that has the potential to influence not just single people, but entire organizations.
One such organization is Sleeping Giants. Borne of the recent political scandals, this social media activist group has taken aim at Breitbart, the self proclaimed alt-right news website known for racist, misogynist, and xenophobic content. It began with the tweet, “Are you aware that you’re advertising on Breitbart, the alt-right’s biggest champion today?” (Farhi). Since then,
Twitter users have taken up the call to action, capturing screen shots of advertising on the website and sending messages with said image directly to the companies via their Twitter accounts. Sleeping Giants followers also took up the cause against advertisers for Bill O’Reilly on Fox News. O’Reilly had, over the years, been accused multiple times of sexual harassment 23 and had negotiated settlements each time. It was the final time that Sleeping Giants sent their
Tweet, dated April 7, that said simply, “Please let Bill O’Reilly’s advertisers know what he’s been up to” (@slpng_giants). The tweet, which included an image with a statement about his accuser, Wendy Walsh, didn’t receive a lot of attention, with only 215 retweets and just over a dozen comments, but it did get the attention of Montel Williams, a well known, long-time talk show host who subsequently joined the conversation and retweeted on behalf of Sleeping Giants.
Whether or not Sleeping Giants was actually instrumental in the O’Reilly Factor losing advertising or if it was just opportune timing is still up for debate, but what’s important here is how tweets expand exponentially.
Sleeping Giants is an outlier to the notion of network and celebrity. This group has no web presence outside of Twitter and Facebook. There are no directors, officers, or structure.
There are over 100,000 people who follow Sleeping Giants on Twitter, and thousands of those followers participate in sending messages to various groups, many of them doing so under their real names and profiles. Sleeping Giants and the people who support and are active in the cause are members of a spontaneous, activist community. Their tactics are simple: send messages to advertisers informing them that their money is being spent on sites that promote racism and misogyny. The only thing that Sleeping Giant asks, is that those who take up the cause do so politely, since most companies have no idea where their advertising money is being spent3. There are, of course, detractors to this organization, namely the staff of Breitbart and their supporters, who believe that their own rights to free speech are being attacked (Fahri). Because of Sleeping
Giants’ anonymity and autonomy, there is a certain level of distrust about this organization from
3 Advertising on the Internet is automated, with programs conducting the buying, selling, and bidding of advertisement space across a number of platforms. It is rare that a corporation knows exactly where all advertisements are at all times. 24 the general population, especially those who might align themselves with groups like Breitbart.
This interconnected and autonomous nature of Twitter means that it really isn’t the size of the group watching, but who is watching, and who is watching them. danah boyd4 is the principal researcher at Microsoft Research and is the founder of Data & Society Research Institute. Her primary research is about the intersection between technology and society. Together with Scott
Golder, also of Microsoft Research, and Gilad Lotan, of Microsoft, they authored an article titled, “Tweet Tweet Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter.” They explain further: “Because Twitter’s structure disperses conversation throughout a network of interconnected actors rather than constraining conversation within bounded spaces or groups, many people may talk about a particular topic at once, such that others have a sense of being surrounded by a conversation, despite perhaps not being an active contributor” (boyd et al. 1). A person does not have to be aware of the group Sleeping Giants to become aware of what they are doing. The nature of Twitter’s messaging system shows messages that are sent, replied to, and retweeted, that reach far beyond the initial audience, and they do so faster than on other social media. This especially holds true when a “retweeter has a large network and occupies structural holes, or gaps in network connectivity between different communities” (boyd et al. 7), such as
Montel Williams, who has followers across generational, racial, and religious lines.
Celebrities form a base that draws people together, whether they be athletes on a sports team, actors on a television show, or an entire fandom. These well known people often communicate directly through social media and “are in a particularly good position to broadcast content for social action” (boyd et al. 7). One of the most recent campaigns was begun in
October 2017 by Alyssa Milano, an actor who has become well known on Twitter for her
4 Her legal name is sans capital letters. 25 political and social activism. Here, the focus is not on her in one of her many roles, but as a writer. She has joined a community for the purpose of writing for change. The campaign, branded under the hashtag #metoo, has spilled over from Twitter to Facebook and Instagram, and originally meant to show the far reaching effects of sexual assault. What has happened in the weeks since this hashtag has gone viral is unprecedented; Hollywood directors, celebrities, and politicians have been publicly ousted as having committed these assaults, some of which have been taking place over the course of decades. The people who are coming together to share their stories do so from all areas of society; here, there are no limits to gender, race, sexuality, only a community of individuals who have been victimized in one form or another. As of yet, there have been no criminal charges, however, there have been severe penalties with lost contracts and canceled series, more of which are coming to light every day. What we can see here is the definition of the apocalyptic turn—the lifting of the veil has happened, and what is left are people coming together for the purpose of sharing.
Not all of this sharing is benevolent, nor is it done with the goal of gaining understanding of other perspectives. Oftentimes, appropriation of a hashtag on twitter is an aggressive action of one group against another. Recently the hashtag #Takeaknee has been trending on Twitter. This hashtag is a result of Colin Kaepernick and other black NFL players, and their supporters kneeling during the national anthem. The physical actions of these players is being viciously discussed on all social media, and the commentary of political and celebrity figures on all sides of the argument feed into the ongoing chaotic narratives.
If we look at hashtags as temporary guerrilla communities, we have are two major groups attempting to control the same digital space. Navigating the dialogue in this type of 26 situation is complex, because, “when the conversation is distributed across a non-cohesive network in which the recipients of each message change depending on the sender, these conversational structures are missing. The result is that, rather than participating in an ordered exchange of interactions, people instead loosely inhabit a multiplicity of conversational contexts at once” (boyd et al.10). Normal conversation relies on an orderly response and answer dialogue, but when two or more groups are intent on conversing within the same digital neighborhood, this crossover negates most productive communication. Most of the discussions that end up devolving are those that stem from the tweets of the celebrities and politicians, placing these individuals at the epicenter of the ensuing discussions.
Perhaps one of the biggest reasons Twitter is popular among celebrities is that the platform allows them to have a public conversation while being able to control private communication. Direct messaging on Twitter can only happen if both people follow each other, which safeguards against spam messaging across the platform. Other social media sites do have protections in place, but the simplicity of Twitter’s settings makes establishing the public/private contact easy. This control, along with the ability to block the worst offenders, creates an instant, single access portal to an ever growing web of contacts.
This web of contacts, or interest clusters, or any number of metaphorical descriptions of contacts on social media, is hard to envision. Alice Marwick, a Fellow at the Data & Society
Research Institute, together with danah boyd, states that, “Technology complicates our metaphors of space and place, including the belief that audiences are separate from each other.
We may understand that the Twitter or Facebook audience is potentially limitless, but we often act as if it were bounded” (2). In life, social circles are usually entities that are mostly separate 27 from each other, with small groups of crossover between them. For the most part, boundaries are clear and solid in face-to-face social groups, but in social media, these boundaries tend to dissolve as strangers become friends of friends.
There exists the idea that every person on Earth is separated from another by only six other people. The key is finding the right people to make the correct links. This theory is attributed to Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy in a short story called Chain-Links (Newman).
This concept has spawned studies for scientists and mathematicians, and became the subject of a
1990 play by John Guare, which was later adapted to film (“Six Degrees”).
This idea was later popularized by The Oracle of Bacon, a website which uses the
Internet Movie Database to calculate how close every actor or actress in history (or, who at least has an IMDB entry) is to actor Kevin Bacon. Users can type in the name of any celebrity and will get a chart that shows the movie and actor/actress links between the celebrity and Mr.
Bacon. It is very difficult to find a “Bacon number” higher than four, given the resume of Mr.
Bacon (Reynolds). Using this theory, a group of Facebook researchers, assisted by others at the
University at Milan, and Cornell, created and ran calculations of the 1.59 billion active users (as of 2016) on Facebook and have determined that since 2011, “our collective “degrees of separation” have shrunk” (Bhagat). These calculations took into account the increase of users over the years of the study, and adjusted the separation number accordingly. Their results show, that as of February, 2016, the degrees of separation between users on Facebook is 3.57.
Unfortunately, the degrees of separation on Twitter is not current; the last time it was measured was in 2010, by the marketing firm Sysomos, and the number they came up with was 4.67
(Sysomos). From these metrics, one thing is clear: our world has grown smaller with social 28 media.
Looking through the lists of people who follow me, and whom I follow on Twitter, I can see that celebrities tend to make up the bulk of commonality between us. However, on Facebook,
I can see ties between the Army, my historical recreation hobby, and my current work environment that I never would have expected, be they familial or completely random. For example, I participate in a worldwide historical recreation group dedicated to pre-Seventeenth century history. I have friends in this group from around the country. A small group of those friends in Utah are friends with a person who is related to someone I was stationed with in the
Army from 1998 to 2000. Another friend from the Army shares a mutual friend with someone from Nova Scotia, with whom I play video games. Were I to go through the friends of every single person I am connected with on Facebook, I would probably have another dozen of these anecdotes to share. boyd and Nicole Ellison, assistant professor at the Department of
Telecommunication, Michigan State University, agree that, “What makes social network sites unique is not that they allow individuals to meet strangers, but rather that they enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks. This can result in connections between individuals that would not otherwise be made” (211).
But with all this interconnectedness and decreasing of degrees of separation, “there is a disconnect between followers and followed” on Twitter (Marwick and boyd 4). The line between celebrity and follower is oftentimes skewed heavily, with the celebrity being followed by millions, while only following a select few. In part, this goes back to the control factor that
Twitter gives, but also shows the broader scope of how information is disseminated across the platform. It also gives insight into concepts of audience, and our perceptions and expectations 29 thereof, as well as the reality of who is really watching. This becomes especially important later, when I discuss audience portrayal in the next chapter.
When it comes to forming activist or interest groups, Twitter has few options, unlike
Facebook, where users can create groups based on specific interests and then set the groups as public, private, or secret. While users can group their individual followers into lists, which can be made public or private, the only way for people to join any sort of group is to either follow organizations like Sleeping Giants, or to follow hashtags. Hashtags, mocked5 in popular culture, are used to search out and gather tweets from the system (sometimes known as the Twitterverse).
It’s important to note that hashtags bear little resemblance to hashing functions in computing, but are another holdover from IRC and bulletin board days, where they were used to designate channels for easier searching (# for a channel or board, as opposed to @ for an individual who might share the same name as the board being sought). It’s also important to note that Twitter’s search function does not require the use of a hashtag for a tweet to be indexed to show up in search results, but hashtagged searches do come up first, which helps like-minded individuals find each other easier. The hashtag allows people to quickly tag a tweet and click on the resulting hyperlink to see other messages using that particular tag. This functionality was integrated into the Twitter system in August, 2007 (Seward). Many people use hashtags in their bios, to mark themselves as members of particular groups and to allow other people to find them. For example,
#aum21 denotes a member of the Auburn University at Montgomery class of 2021, while
#myaum is commonly used by students and faculty alike to mark posts concerning the university.
5 A 2013 episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon included a skit between Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake, where each time they would finish a statement, they would say “hashtag” and a phrase related to the previous comment. This mocking highlighted the difference between how hastags are read and how they would sound as part of conversation. 30
Both tags are also used by local business for promotional purposes. These tags represent the temporary communities of the university, but are capitalized upon by the permanent structures of business. Searching the community class tags of AUM gives two distinct views of those communities, tied together by the corporate world.
These tags are also an important feature of Twitter’s Trending Topics. Users can choose a region of the world, then narrow that further to regional or city locations. There is also an option to get “tailored trends,” but the tailoring is suspect. Twitter claims that these tailored trends are based on where a person lives, and who they follow, but I have yet to note anything different between those topics and the national topics. boyd et al. explain further: “One interpretation of
Twitter’s value derives from the real-time nature of the conversations it supports. Its search and
“trending topics” functionality captures public conversations in real time from its entire user population, and this temporality has moved Google to spend more effort considering “real time search”” (boyd et al. 6). In fact, searching trending topics and hashtags on Google will show the direct link to Twitter as the top link, over and above any other social network that has adopted the hashtag function.
Like the #metoo movement, most groups and movements begin with a common goal or desired outcome, and many of them are born out of an event or series of events. In the past, groups were limited by their technology. Now, social media has changed how groups are formed by adding the immediacy of time and removing barriers of distance in communication. The activist group, Black Lives Matter is one of these movements. Black Lives Matter began in 2013 after the killing of Trayvon Martin and subsequent acquittal of George Zimmerman. Per their site, the group is an “ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are 31 systematically and intentionally targeted for demise” (“Herstory”). Since the first time the
#BlackLivesMatter hashtag was used in 2013, until today, the group has evolved into a full movement with over a dozen chapters across the United States.
Monica Anderson and Paul Hitlin, researchers at Pew Research Center, compiled data about race and hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter in social media in three case studies. Of the
#BlackLivesMatter hashtag, they noted that, “The hashtag has been used approximately 12 million times from July 12, 2013, through March 31, 2016, and during this period, it was used more often in support of the movement than in opposition to it” (Anderson and Hitlin 3). The extensive data analysis, conducted by Crimson Hexagon, a social media data analytics company,
“found that the volume of race-related tweets tended to peak in the immediate aftermath of high- profile events and reflected more of a synthesis of ideas and reactions than an account of the details of those events” (Anderson 4). This software didn’t necessarily count the number of hashtags, but rather any post about race, “if it included an explicit reference to blacks, whites or the concept of race in general” (Anderson and Hitlin 9), and did so over the course of 15 months, from January 2015 through March 2016 (Anderson and Hitlin 9). As far as the specific hashtag,
#BlackLivesMatter didn’t catch on on Twitter until the killing of Tamir Rice in Cleveland in
November, 2014, over a year after the hashtag first appeared on the site (Anderson and Hitlin
15). It was the promotion of the hashtag during this incident by the Black Lives Matter activists that brought the conversation under one umbrella and furthered the growth of the movement.
These conversations about race aren’t just happening spur of the moment, either. The study shows that, “The analysis found that most of the largest race-focused conversations on
Twitter during this period came the day following a major event—after people had time to 32 process the event and formulate their reactions” (Anderson and Hitlin 9). Outside of normal informational channels, #BlackLivesMatter and racial discussions peak and ebb with the continued racial attacks and killings. Throughout, however, are the continuous underlying conversations that keep the movement active and on the global radar.
Groups like these often find that their harshest critics will use known hashtags as well as other hashtags (in conjunction) to criticize or even harm the initial cause. Instead of joining in a conversation, these counter-protestors appropriate the data to spin the narrative to their own discourse. Following the shootings of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge in July 2016, the hashtags #AllLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter began to appear in response to
#BlackLivesMatter. It was also around this time that the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag was used in more tweets that were critical of the cause (Anderson and Hitlin 4). This counter-narrative does not take into account the history of #BlackLivesMatter, nor does it want to engage or even acknowledge the group, but its purpose is to discredit the work and reasons for the group’s entire existence altogether. In this way, #BlackLivesMatter has become one of the most divisive hashtags in the history of Twitter, with politicians and other groups weighing in on both sides, and continuing to confuse the dialogue through false dilemmas created with other hashtags, like
#BlueLivesMatter, and #AllLivesMatter.
Some of the data are also skewed by other types of appropriation. The PEW report briefly discusses the use of #AllLivesMatter outside of racial conversations, and cites a number of cases where it has been used by anti-abortionists and even vegans (Anderson and Hitlin 21). In this case, it is obvious that phrasing is key; using encompassing words like “all” in #AllLivesMatter allows for the narrative to be appropriated by other groups within their conversational nodes. 33
Unfortunately, the data doesn’t show the percentage of these side conversations that arose during the study time period.
All of these conversations, even the ones that run counter to the original messages, are important. They are especially important to our students, because these are the issues that most of them face every day. How they navigate these issues and how they can parse the data into something tangible is challenging enough on its own, but to do so in real-time discussions on
Twitter adds a dimension of difficulty that many are not prepared for. Tamir Rice and Trayvon
Martin were close in age to the students in university classrooms right now, and that fact, along with the repercussions, cannot be ignored. Of this inherent pain, Blitz and Hurlburt said of their students, “The wounds are open, the eyes are open, the possibilities are open, and the mouths are open, trying to say things to use, from us, that we have barely begun to learn how to hear, to allow ourselves to say” (89). In order for educators to help students grasp and own their language in these conversations, educators need to do the same. Each one of these deaths is a national disaster. Every time another person shares the #metoo hashtag, they are putting aside their fear and joining a greater dialogue about a global problem.
Susan Sontag said, “From a psychological point of view, the imagination of disaster does not greatly differ from one period in history to another. But from a political and moral point of view, it does. The expectation of the apocalypse may be the occasion for a radical disaffiliation from society” (48). Sontag’s context here is the 17th century pilgrimage of Eastern European
Jews to Palestine (48), but the sentiment still stands, perhaps more now that our definitions of society are more global than before. This radical disaffiliation from society is intriguing; on one hand, there are those who take the physical step with this, those who call themselves preppers or 34 survivalists. On the other, there are those who find themselves engaged online more than in face- to-face communication. Both of these groups, and all of those in between, use the Internet to find their like-minded cohorts and engage, because even though they are crossing physical space,
“they are still typically bounded by a reasonably well-defined group of participants in some sort of shared social context” (boyd et al. 1). The resulting conversations that sometimes cross over between these different groups are compelling. Trying to find common ground between these disparate groups, or at least some sort of understanding, is more difficult given how technology has helped language grow and change through globalization and immediacy of connection. The academy is also subject to these changes, since most students do not have the access to the language of the academy prior to joining. What they do have is access to a rich resource of data and information absorb and incorporate into their perspectives.
One of the early issues with social media sites and the Internet at large is the spoofing of celebrities and other persons of renown. When the market first opened around 1999 for the average person to register top level domain names, people tried (and some succeeded) to register names of famous persons. Most of the time, threats of legal proceedings were enough, and other times, money changed hands in exchange for the domain names. When social media became more prevalent, it became obvious that there needed to be a way to identify properly vetted individuals. Twitter does so through the use of verified accounts, which are seen as a small blue check mark next to the individual’s screen name. Twitter approves verified account types from people in “music, acting, fashion, government, politics, religion, journalism, media, sports, business, and other key interest areas” (Twitter), which means that not every person with a verified account is a celebrity, or famous, but that these checks are in place so people can be 35 assured that they are following the authentic person and not a spam account.
Government accounts are of particular interest in that they represent agencies, not individual people. For example, @FBI and @CIA are verified accounts, but @NSA is not.
However, @NSAGov is the verified account for the National Security Agency, perhaps because the original @NSA was registered prior to account verification.
In response to internal memorandums released shortly after the last presidential inauguration, prohibiting staff from many departments from posting on Twitter after an individual posted that material on climate change and civil rights had “disappeared from the official White House website” (Gorman). To be fair, when an administration changes, website addresses can change, and information must be updated to represent the current administration.
This is not always a seamless endeavor, given the number of pages and agencies in the administration. Previous administrative webpages are also archived for posterity, and that causes delays in the system as well. However, other memorandums began to circulate limiting how these agencies were to communicate with the public, and what information they were allowed to share. Around this same time, a series of tweets were released from the Badlands National Park official Twitter account that discussed climate change. These tweets were quickly deleted, and officials later said that an unauthorized user posted them, and that “the agency was being encouraged to use Twitter to post public safety and park information only, and to avoid national policy issues” (Gorman).
In response, many rogue accounts for these verified agencies, more specifically, science agencies, began showing up on Twitter. These rogue/alt agencies are not verified accounts, and there is no way to verify who actually runs them, private citizens or people who work for these 36 agencies and wish to remain anonymous. The majority of these accounts do state in the bio section that they are not run by government officials, nor are they affiliated with the agencies, oftentimes naming the official agencies with their @ username.
Alice Stollmeyer, who runs a digital advocacy consultancy and is the Communications
Director at the Women Political Leaders Global Forum in Brussels, Belgium, has dubbed the
Twitter resistance movement #twistance, a combination of Twitter + resistance (Noe). Stollmeyer has compiled two publicly available lists of these organizations from her own verified Twitter account. These lists, dubbed Twistance and Twistance 2, consist of rogue or alt US federal science agencies and other federal departments, respectively. There are over 120 accounts on those lists, some of them multiples of the same agency. Many of these accounts are still actively used, often for criticisms about current administration policies across the spectrum of government, not just the areas the accounts were originally created for.
The curious part of this Rogue/Alt government movement isn’t that it happened at all, but that it happened on such a large scale, with each account seemingly created independent of the other. Perhaps it was a cascade effect, when one account went viral, others quickly followed suit.
Unlike #BlackLivesMatter and issues of race, where Anderson says, “Twitter was more likely to be used as a place to respond to events and synthesize ideas than as a platform to report details of incidents as they occurred” (Anderson and Hitlin 10), the immediate creation of alternative accounts, each using the hashtags #resist and #resistance was in answer to what was seen as a salvo against the scientific community. Twitter proves itself to be a tool to not only compose and communicate ideas, but also to attempt to effect change, or at least begin a discussion.
People within the academy have also been involved with guerrilla composition on 37
Twitter. Marc C. Santos and Meredith Zoetewey Johnson, from the University of South Florida, contributed a piece to Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition. In their essay, titled “From Constituting to Instituting, Kant, Latour, and Twitter,” they discuss Latour’s criticism of the separation of academics and politics, highlighting the schism between the academy and the rest of the world. The authors argue that the same political issues that abound outside the walls of the university are the same as those within, and that the politics of the academy are best seen with “internal, institutional processes — specifically, tenure and promotion” (59). During proposed budget cuts discussions at the University of South Florida, outside politics and the academy came to blows. Johnson took to Twitter and used the hashtag
#saveUSF to promote the message. Santos, however, wrote a blog post, which was subsequently tweeted as well. The authors state that it is not possible to “concretely demonstrate that the activities of Meredith and her graduate students directly influenced mainstream media coverage or that they even originated the #save USF hashtag…but we can demonstrate that Meredith’s and her students’ very public participation in the debate traveled a much different path than Marc’s blog post” (71).
Johnson’s usage of Twitter gained far more visibility than Santos’ blog post, and this crossed the divide into the political realm when representatives had taken note of Johnson’s messages. Both authors made phone calls to the same representative, and while Santos’ message was taken down, Johnson was actually transferred to the representatives aide, where she had a discussion and found out that not only had they seen her tweets, but they had also looked into her background (73). While her experience was a positive one, it sends an alarming message, that
“here is a testament not only to academics’ increased ability to impact political process but also 38 the necessity of shielding them from political retribution. Becoming political activists will require political protection” (73).
There are people who believe that the academy should not mix with the political world, and there are many good reasons not to, but in the apocalyptic turn, where more people are seeing the academy as an elitist, out-of-touch place, educators cannot afford to be complacent? In trying to teach students how to write and communicate more effectively, we should use real world situations and methods to show them how their words can bring about change. 39
Chapter 3
Twitter and Guerrilla Composition in the Classroom
In the midst of chaos, there is opportunity. —Sun Tzu, The Art of War
We often talk of change and chaos as things to be feared, and yet, there are underlying circumstances that show us how our series of choices brings us to where we are today. Thirty years ago, communication was a completely different creation, and the first hints of real-time, personal, global conversations were there, but still years away. Now, people get upset when their phones are only transmitting in 3G, and dialup is something that our students have heard of, but they have never experienced the sound of their own computers squawking and buzzing. Many of them have never even heard the sound. To them, the hashtag has always been called that, and they have no idea that it is also called a pound sign. The majority of our students are post-
Millenials, and they have grown up in a world where technology changes fast, and the tragedies happen even faster. Our collective sense of what is normal changes almost every day, and this constant feeling of being off-balance is disconcerting.
In “The Post Apocalyptic Turn,” Moon notes that, “Modern technology has made it possible to destroy the world or wipe out entire peoples, as borne out by the Holocaust and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” (4) and I would add to that the many attempted genocides around the world, the small attacks in our schools, as well as the global attacks via the
Internet. He goes on to suggest that instead of focusing these acts as portends of the end of the world, that “apocalypse can also refer to a catastrophic change that results in the demise of old order and the creation of a new one” (4). As I have suggested throughout, the apocalypse is something to be accepted and used, not fought. 40
Fortunately (and unfortunately) for our students, they are more accepting of and adaptable to these changes than those of us who lived before and through all of these technological advances. Then maybe educators should help our students harness that adaptability and use it to bridge the gap between all that once was in recent history, and all that is now. This can be done if the academics from older generations can learn to adapt our ways of thinking and composing to their styles of learning and communicating. Adaptation is one of the major keys to survival in any situation, even in the area between the academy and the rest of the world. For all of this to happen, though, we need to explore all ways of adapting composition with technology.
In Chapter 2, I gave a brief outline of Twitter, its history, and its typical usage. I did not fully address retweeting, because it is here that the practice can be better explored. The ability to share another person’s tweet, or retweeting, was not originally part of the programming, but something that people came up with in order to share with other people in other parts of their networks. boyd and Ellison, in their defining of Twitter as a social network site, suggest that
“Structurally, retweeting is the Twitter-equivalent of email forwarding where users post messages originally posted by others” (1). In the past, the act of retweeting required some mental gymnastics because of the 140 character limitations. If a user wished to retweet, etiquette required them to not only note that the message was a retweet, but to also notify the originator of the message, via their @ symbol. To work around having to cut and paste messages, and in order to give credit to the originators of the Tweets, users came up with different ways of identifying their posts as a retweet. The acronym “RT” was one of the most common, generally followed by the originator’s @username. This often left people short of available characters, and so some aspects of chat speak (or l33t speak) would be employed. boyd and Ellison refer to this practice 41 as “disemvoweling,” or the removal of vowels to create more room for the original message
(boyd et al. 5). To further this, users often remove punctuation like apostrophes, which are easily ignored. This functionality has since been integrated into the system, and retweeting someone no longer requires giving up precious character space for their @username. Additionally, the platform now includes the ability to comment on the retweet, with another full 140 characters, allowing individuals to engage in actual conversation. The appearance of the retweet is much like a snapshot and caption. Even though the platform now automatically includes retweets, usernames, and the quoted messages, the 140 character limitation still requires some savvy on the part of the person retweeting. boyd and Ellison write, “What participants value and the strategies they use when retweeting reveal salient aspects of the conversations they seek to create on Twitter” (boyd et al. 2). In many cases, people choose to retweet without comment, allowing the initial message to stand on its own. If a person wishes to engage in the conversation, whether they want to speak directly to the person who originally tweeted, or at large to their perceived audience, they have to make rhetorical choices that either complement or oppose the original verbiage enough to make its own impression. Regardless of whether the initial message is replied to, or of the originator chooses to engage, “Retweets can knit together tweets and provide a valuable conversational infrastructure. Whether participants are actively commenting or simply acknowledging that they’re listening, they’re placing themselves inside a conversation. Even when they are simply trying to spread a tweet to a broader audience, they are bringing people into a conversation” (boyd et al. 7).
David Crystal believes that, “Twitter does not seem to be a type of social network in which conversational dialogue and group cohesion predominate” (Crystal 53). Just as language 42 on a screen is different than on a page, conversations online are also wildly different. With
Twitter, conversations can take part from one single tweet, the whole of a thread, or just one aspect of that thread. Being able to retweet from individual segments of a longer thread allows for what we could consider sidebar conversations in person. Additionally, each of these sidebar conversations attract the attention of different groups.
If we imagine this as a room full of people, our speaker would be on a stage. Clusters of people would be around the speaker, each trying to comment on different sentences in their speech. Some of them would also be yelling across the room at other people. A few of those people would be running back and forth from one conversation to another. And there would be a few who are standing on the fringes, just nodding their heads at everything that is being said. It would look like live action pandemonium. This isn’t a normal conversation map; Twitter does not thread in a logical way, and so people have to adapt their responses accordingly. Not only that, they also have to keep track of what they’ve said and where in order to continue the conversation.
Retweeting is what brings Twitter to life. Without this ability, there is no conversation, but rather, millions of people yelling into the void. As boyd, Golder, and Lotan state,
“Retweeting is also an important practice to analyze because of the larger issues it raises concerning authorship, attribution, and communicative fidelity. In an environment where conversations are distributed across the network, referents are often lost as messages spread and the messages themselves often shift” (boyd et al. 1). Keeping this in mind, I began to think about how to bring this social medium into the classroom, and how I could use it to help students understand composition, context, and the clues that would help them to make sense of the chaos, 43 while being a part of it. One of my challenges in the beginning was to overcome their own notions of what composition is, and help them to see what many educators actually consider it to be.
Miller, in “The Coming Apocalypse” says that before the Internet, “no other means of human communication has ever had the capability to travel so far so quickly to such devastating effect” (143). He goes on to say that going into any language arts classroom, one would never know such change is out there (144). These unchanging behaviours in many classrooms is concerning, but not surprising, as traditionalists have held as long as composition has been in place, that the place of composition is to serve English departments. Sharon Crowley, in her 1998 work, Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays, takes aim at the historical norm of white, Christian, wealthy men being the sole beneficiaries of the classic liberal arts education (48). In a 1989 article, a former professor at the University of Texas at Austin, in response to an attempted modernization of composition classes, said that writing should be about literature, and that he expects “an English faculty to represent a widely varied range of views about literature, centered around historical and aesthetic traditions (Gribben 89). Further, he said that, “If you really care about women and minorities making it in society, it doesn’t make sense to divert their attention to oppression when they should be learning basic writing skills” (qtd. in
Crowley 255). The message is clear, people should know their place and only stay in that place.
While the UTA scandal and subsequent publications6 happened well before the Internet age, and Crowley’s historical assessment came about during the Internet’s infancy, they show the long held beliefs of the traditionalists in the field. Many of these academics are still teaching in
6 A number of articles about this situation exist behind a paywall in the archives of the Chronicles of Higher Education. 44 universities, and their “expectations of education remain frozen in time, preserved like some prehistoric insect in a golden drop of amber” (“The Coming Apocalypse” 144). Is it any small wonder, then, that the academy is still trying to find a place for composition, and that modern composition as a field is still misunderstood? While my own experience has not been extreme, I have gotten quizzical looks from some literature professors about my plans for using Twitter for narrative writing, as well as this thesis. Composition as a field is its own guerrilla entity within the larger academy.
Not all historical models are bad. Lynch, quoting Latour, discusses the Icelandic
Parliament, or Althing, which is the oldest government still in use today (467). The Thing, as it is called, is a designated place for people to come air disagreements and settle disputes. In the Early
Middle Ages, all free members of a society7 had the right to attend the Thing; there were no secret meetings, and all laws were read aloud for the populace. If we consider our classrooms as a place where students have equal voice and are free to “make their experience and their vision part of composition’s Thing” (468), then perhaps we can consider the medium of Twitter as a place to settle those disputes and give name to their experiences in small group settings within a larger context. In this way, students can examine issues outside of their immediate realms, and integrate their own experiences with the “social, political, and environmental problems of their communities” (464). In doing so, they build from within, techniques for dealing with those issues when they are faced with them outside of the academy.
The classroom is a temporary community with predetermined end dates. Classes last 15 weeks or so, before the population breaks off to join other communities on the campus. Most
7 There were no definitive regional borders during this time, so there were many societies, or tribes, and therefore, many Things. 45 students take more than one class, so are part of many of these communities. When they realize that each of these communities are interconnected, and begin to transfer the knowledge from one community to another, and then realize where this knowledge fits into their lives outside of the academy, we consider it a turning point in their education. As a first year composition instructor,
I consider it a goal to help them along the way to achieving this kind of clarity. This semester, I wanted to try something new. Instead of focusing on standard assignments like song analysis essays, I wanted to explore ways of composing to enhance student thinking, processing, and reacting. We teach writing as a process, and go through the motions of brainstorming, outlining, writing, and revising, but I think a few things are missed sometimes. During the process, we talk about vague concepts like audience, and I’ve had issues with getting students beyond the “my instructor is my audience” phase. Some of them never move beyond that idea, and it’s no surprise, given the vagueness of the concept on the Internet. Marwick and boyd wrote that some users “imagined their audience as people they already knew, conceptualizing Twitter as a social space where they could communicate with pre-existing friends” (5). While many of us follow friends and colleagues on Twitter, a lot of people tend to also follow people they do not know, or who follow them back at all. Who then, are we writing to? According to this idea, we are writing solely to our friends, but it’s not necessarily our friends who are listening. This was also an important piece for students to understand, that “The potential diversity of readership on Twitter ruptures the ability to vary self-presentation based on audience, and thus manage discrete impressions” (3). Unless their accounts were locked down, which they had the option to do if they chose, what they were going to tweet was to be considered as going to a far broader audience than the peer group to which they were tweeting. 46
The standard set of assignments for Graduate Teaching Assistants, Adjuncts, and
Lecturers at AUM for English Composition I, which teaches the essentials of composition and rhetoric, begins with a narrative essay. We are given a lot of freedom in choosing what type of narrative, and my standard is a literacy narrative. I like to see where my students are coming from in terms of their reading and writing history, so I have an idea of where to go with each of them through the rest of the semester. For the Fall 2017 semester, I decided to incorporate
Twitter into my classroom. I know professors who have had students live tweet lectures and classroom activities, but I’m not certain that students are ready for this type of summary exercise this early in the semester. I have also heard of exercises where students use tweets to outline thesis statements, and if I keep using this exercise, will be using that. In fact, a Google search gave me hundreds of thousands of hits on how to use Twitter in the classroom. The top search hit, “Teach Hub,” has a list of 50 exercises for K-12 students on Twitter, ranging from political activism to meme tracking.
I decided to do something a little different. My original lesson plan stated that their final essay was going to be submitted as a Twitter thread. Initially, students were to write out their narrative in standard essay form. Rough drafts would be peer reviewed in that format. Afterward, students were to split their essays up into a series of tweets and post them as threads.
This changed by early the second week when I realized there was a lot of confusion about the difference between rough and final drafts were going to work for grading. Instead, I realized that the lesson could be adapted to show them the differences between writing an essay through the process of invention, writing, and revising, to including a last step of reinventing for social media consumption. With my students’ agreement, we changed the assignment, and the Twitter 47 thread took the place of one of their weekly writing posts. Their standard narrative essay is what was graded as part of the assignment. This was fair; it was the first assignment of the first semester of university for most of the students, and deviating fully from their expectations of
English class was too stressful for all of us.
To prepare for the Twitter thread exercise, I created my own thread and tweeted it. The thread, as shown below, isn’t a narrative, but more of an interactive instructional essay to give them an idea of how it works. The text is as follows:
This is an example of a Tweet thread. 1/
Twitter, for those unfamiliar, allows the author 140 characters per tweet. 2/
This count includes spaces, emojis, and punctuation. 3/
Most threads also include a numbering system, like I'm using for this. 4/
That way, if people retweet something in the middle, 5/
other viewers know to go to the beginning. 6/
When composing in such a small space, the author needs to make good rhetorical
choices. 7/
Some of these choices are stylistic; 8/
cutting off in the middle of a list, or 9/
highlighting a single word or phrase are effective ways of making concise points. 10/
People fail in tweet threading when the begin to ramble. 11/
Instead of saying precisely what they mean, they fall into bad habits. 12/
Filler words and phrases take over. 13/
For the most part... 14/ 48
Alternative choice... 15/
Each and every... 16/
During the course of... 17/
I believe... 18/
At this point in time... 19/
It's all fluff. 20/
Too much fluff and your audience loses interest. 21/
Your thread isn't engaging anymore. 22/
Remember, this is a composition. 23/
If something doesn't work, if it doesn't make sense, you can fix it! 24/
This is not spur of the moment writing! 25/
People who create these threads do so in document form prior to posting them. 26/
This allows for both revision and editing, 27/
which, you should have figured out by now, 28/
is the final piece of the process. 29/29
I then sent the students a link to a Twitter thread with the instructions to just read it. We then went over it in class. Next, we looked at a thread written by Anthony Breznican, a senior staff writer for Entertainment Weekly, and an author. Shortly after the bombing at the Manchester
Arena, he took to Twitter after seeing a famous quote from Mr. Rogers. His first tweet, as seen in
Figure 3.1, sets the stage for him to share his own story. The following screenshots and subsequent analysis is a combination of mine and my students’ analysis. 49
At the bottom of the tweet, there are a few data sets. Directly below the tweet and date/time information, there is a section with an exact count of Retweets and Likes. To the right are the user icons of a few of the people who have retweeted this particular tweet. I don’t know if those were the first, or most recent people who retweet that message, or if they are chosen at random. Below that is a line of small icons. The first, a rough text bubble, shows that at the time of this screen capture, 307 people had responded to that first tweet. From there, we can see that Twitter won’t provide an exact number, but instead, an average of how many have either Retweeted or Liked that single post. The last icon is the ubiquitous e-mail or message icon. This icon is misleading, because on Twitter, Direct
Messages can only be sent to those people who follow each other, or those with whom a user has previously shared messages, but might no longer follow.
As with many longer Twitter threads, Breznican numbers his with a sequential number, followed by the forward slash at the end of each tweet. Without this numbering system, there is 50 potential for confusion on many levels. Should a viewer retweet only a portion of a thread, that person’s followers might not understand what is going on if no numbering system is used.
Tweets could potentially send the wrong message if they are viewed out of context.
After a brief intro, wherein Breznican gives some background on his life, he gets to the meat of his thread, which is he was having a difficult time with the rigors of adult life and school, and he meets Mr. Rogers in an elevator just days after seeing his show on a particularly bad day.
Here is where
Breznican starts to make some rhetorical choices that break from the traditional academic rules.
He uses a single word,
“Almost.” as a full sentence in Tweet 12
(Figure 3.3). He uses slang, in the form of “y’all” in Tweet 15. But these choices, within the realm of Twitter and the Internet, take what would have been a potentially overly formal 51 narrative in an English class, and turned it into a short tale of human kindness and emotion.
The use of “Almost.” in Tweet 12 is a humorous pause; one can assume that as a writer for an Entertainment magazine, Breznican has met his share of celebrities, yet it was Mr. Rogers, star of a children’s television show, that almost caused him to geek out.
Breznican’s use of that single word as a Tweet also shows versatility. He had just enough room to include it at the end of
Tweet 11, which he ended at 128 characters, but he didn’t. He used it as a breath, as a prelude for what was to come.
Grammatically, this means of using single word sentence fragments as emphasis is incorrect, but it is becoming more popular as a literary style device. In this form, it is more effective than if he had written a full statement. He’s talking about meeting a childhood hero, where he is trying to maintain calm, but can’t quite manage, and this single word tweet 52 conveys that rushed, almost embarrassed, but joyful emotion. This emotional pull can resonate with his readership, and draw people together in their own conversations. Just as people meet and form their social communities in person, they do the same in the digital world, and tragedy, tempered with sentiment, tends to bring people together regardless of medium. He employs this tactic again in Tweet 20 (Figure 3.4).
Remember,
Breznican is discussing grief and loss shortly after a terrorist attack.
He uses the word
“Brokenhearted.” in
Tweet 20 as a complete sentence. He could have combined it with the sentence prior, but letting the statement, “I felt adrift” on its own gives a sense of being alone and without direction.
“Brokenhearted” is implied in the statement, but he solidifies it by having it stand on its own. Contextually, it makes 53 sense. It can stand alone, even though it is grammatically incorrect, and still be rhetorically sound. His empathy in this short statement is palpable and needs no further elaboration.
Rhetorical choices like this show how powerful this type of composition can be. He’s appealing to the emotions of his audience by different avenues. Sorrow, nostalgia, and love come together in his words without them being overdone. His story comes across as honest, and his audience reacts to it in a positive way. Each viewer retweets, likes, or does both with the passages that mean the most to them. This is a powerful means of communication when done simply, and the messages that threads like this convey can be compelling without being disingenuous.
Here is a visually rhetorical choice that
Breznican made in bracketing his entire thread with the same image (Figure 3.5). He’s taken his audience through a deeply personal time in his own life, and this second posting of the same image, with the statement, “I never saw him again. 54
But that “helper” quote? That’s authentic. That’s who he was. For real” (Breznican) creates a powerful thread. It is also a buildup to an even more powerful ending, as he ties his feelings of loss upon Mr. Rogers’ death to the intro song on Rogers’ long running television show, “I was mourning the loss of a neighbor” (Breznican).
It is also here that we can see the most common way of ending a tweet thread, and understand the purpose of the forward slash. Authors choose between the use of a number-slash- number system, e.g., 31/31, or as we see above, 31/end. Marking the end of a thread is just as important when creating these narrative strings because sometimes other replies can throw off the compiling that Twitter performs, so that a user might have to click a link or scroll further down the screen to pick the thread back up. Oftentimes, this isn’t a problem if a person is reading a thread from the beginning, but it can happen.
Anthony Breznican is a writer by trade, so it’s to be expected that his prose, even on
Twitter, would be elevated. It isn’t. As noted, it’s not even grammatically correct, but it is appropriate for his audience. It works for his narrative.
The students picked up on the simplicity of the language. They noticed that there aren’t fancy words, but more importantly, there isn’t any Internet slang. Breznican uses complete sentences. Armed with this knowledge, I instructed the students to take their original literacy narrative essays and condense and change the information into a Twitter thread of no fewer than
15 tweets. They were allowed to write as many as they needed to, but they were not to simply cut and paste their essays into 140 character chunks. I did allow them to use abbreviations or slang, but only if it was necessary to the context they were trying to achieve with their message and if they were short on character space. I warned them to be cautious in using these shortcuts; using 55 non-standard abbreviations might be misconstrued, or worse, offensive. Having a good grasp of the English language and how it sounds is vital to being able to shorten words and keep their meaning (Crystal 5-6).
The reach of blog posts and tweets are vastly different. Each retweet of the individual parts of a twitter composition thread will reach a broader audience than single reposts of an entire essay, even if that essay is linked on twitter. Additionally, every time a person “likes” a tweet, as noted by the heart icons, it is linked in its own column on that person’s page. Their followers can see those likes, which also help to promote messages. There are those out there who have issues with twitter threads, or tweetstorms, as detractors call them (Sanders). Sam
Sanders, a reporter and host at National Public Radio says some believe these people who create long tweet threads clutter users twitter feeds with threads that are far too long, and usually either too strongly emotive, or too banal (Sanders). One thread mentioned is a 127 tweet thread by Eric
Garland, concerning game theory, the 2016 election, and Russia. He admitted that he had no plan when he began typing, and that’s “a little bit of why the story careens from side to side” (qtd. in
Sanders). I have read and saved Garland’s thread, and will be using it, along Breznican’s thread as examples of what to emulate and what to avoid as far as language and content. Garland’s message was well suited to his audience; comments from his followers were mostly positive.
However, if he wished to expand outside of his social or political circle, his message would not be as well received. This is how communication goes awry and the little wars are lost.
In the end, the majority of students had positive things to say about the assignment. They made real effort to revise and review how they would change their essays depending on their audience, and once they got the hang of numbering their tweets, it wasn’t as difficult as they 56 originally thought it would be. The students didn’t take advantage of using any sort of slang or abbreviations, either, but kept their statements whole. Most importantly, they understood the importance of being able to be clear about their message on social media, and why keeping audience in mind is paramount to their goals.
One of the topics I keep circling back to stems from Bartholomae’s “Inventing the
University.” I recognize that the university has its own language and is its own discourse community, and this is necessary to introduce students to the vocabulary they will be using throughout their professional lives. I experienced the same thing when I had to learn the language of the Army. Much of life happens outside of the academy, though, and as the divide between the humanities and the modern world grows, perhaps we should consider some fundamental changes. I see part of this as a divide between literature and composition and the place of each in the academy. My reentry into the English department was in the world of
Literature, where formal papers are written and submitted primarily on paper, and rarely, via e- mail. Some professors use their respective Learning Management Systems, but many of those systems aren’t user friendly.
It is rare that the online world makes an appearance in a lot of the literature classrooms.
This is slowly changing, but adaptation happens over time. When I began teaching, I held the same beliefs. While my students turned their papers in online, I did not allow technology at all in the classroom, only outside of it. After the first semester of Composition Theory in the MTW program where we watched multi-modal compositions on Kairos and created our own, to my observations of other instructors and our discussions, I began to realize that my logic was faulty; my own life is wrapped up in technology, so I should be trying to use it to enhance student 57 learning. After all, I use electronic means for the assigning and turning in of work, why would I limit their writing to standard, traditional essay forms? I was guilty of applying not only the historically divisive social traditions in my classroom, but was also myopic about the potential for technology to enhance the learning experience.
I will admit to some continued contradictory practices—I don’t allow unfettered use of phones or laptops in class, and I believe that hand written notes are still superior for learning, but
I do try to incorporate computers where possible. Students are allowed to use their tech while we workshop, and they take pictures of the boards after we have collaborated. To my surprise, a good number of my students say that they prefer to compose on their phones.
Steven Pinker, in “Why Academics Stink at Writing,” calls out the overblown, confusing prose of the academy. He asks, “Why should a profession that trades in words and dedicates itself to the transmission of knowledge so often turn out prose that is turgid, soggy, wooden, bloated, clumsy, obscure, unpleasant to read, and impossible to understand?” (Pinker). While his assessment is harsh, I can recall conversations I’ve had with academics who often agree with the sentiment. Some call these texts, “dense,” while others have been more straightforward with their criticisms. This tradition of overblown, difficult academic writing goes back to the age of print journals, where there is dedicated space, and a hefty subscription fee, and the notion that,
“academics have no choice but to write badly because the gatekeepers of journals and university presses insist on ponderous language as proof of one’s seriousness” (Pinker). Pinker does go on to cite a small study that disproves this idea, but we can wonder if there isn’t a grain of truth to the thought.
Are we, as educators, inadvertently gatekeeping our universities through the use of 58 language, and falling prey to some unspoken ideas of tradition? Is our discourse community founded on an old idea of self-consciousness? Pinker, discussing style, said, “It’s easy to see why academics fall into self-conscious style. Their goal is not so much communication as self- presentation—an overriding defensiveness against any impression that they may be slacker than their peers in hewing to the norms of the guild” (Pinker). What are these norms, who put them in place, and why are people still cowing to them when they are obviously doing more harm than good? Our students have been conditioned throughout their years of education to expect certain things in school. They expect to write standard five-paragraph essays with fully structured thesis sentences that won’t be read by their teachers. They do not expect to come into class and create social media accounts for the sole purpose of writing an essay. This non-traditional expectation throws them off; this is not what “they” said composition class was going to be like. They question, much like other academics do, what something like this has to do with academic discourse and writing in the university.
These mysterious people don’t exist; they are products of the academy. They don’t represent real people, but rather, old ideas. They are the epitome of “that’s the way it’s always been done.” The world outside of the academy is changing at lightning speed, but the
Humanities, that creative, inventive, dreaming, research and deep thought based collection of studies, hasn’t kept up so well. Jeff Grabill, now the Associate Provost for Teaching, Learning, and Technology at Michigan State University, presented a TED talk where he discussed texting and writing. He notes that, “Computer networks have revolutionized many things, but they’ve completely changed the nature and meaning of writing. Except in school. In school, we still teach writing roughly the same way we taught it about 100 years ago. If we teach it at all, it’s truly the 59 neglected “R.” It’s on the margins of education” (Grabill). We’ve gone from neglecting effective analogue8 writing skills, those that matter in the world outside of academia, to neglecting them in the digital world, where the impact is on a global scale.
The crux of all this is: academics aren’t only writing for academics and academic journals anymore, and students are learning to write in multiple English dialects in order to communicate in more mediums than ever. Most journals are now online, and many of them provide free access to abstracts, and select articles. What was once a private, select club is no more. Our students can find almost anything they need for school online. I’ve done it. Paywalls are generally no trouble to get around; someone has uploaded the scholarly article somewhere. Barring that, there’s always the university provided Interlibrary Loan system, where someone at a distant college will scan in the article to PDF, and email it directly to an inbox. Knowledge transfer isn’t solely face- to-face anymore, and in more and more cases, that personal contact is non-existent in the academy thanks to online learning.
Audience plays an even bigger role now that learning and communication happens in the digital world. Whereas we teach a process of writing, revising, and rewriting, we have an added layer of immediacy through digital means. Once our messages are out, there is no going back to revise and resubmit. Yes, revision can happen, but our edits are available now for all to see. What we have written in the past, prior to the Internet, is also available for scrutiny, especially if the work has been previously published. Many journals and other organizations are digitizing historical works for archival purposes. Audiences are no longer immediate colleagues or classmates, but people who would never before have been in the author’s sphere of influence.
8 A number of studies show deeper connections with learning retention by those who take notes with pen and paper than by those who take notes digitally. 60
Influence is power, and with that power comes the knowledge that students have to accept immediate responsibility for their actions and words, and that these words have weight, and that they can promote change. Our students also need to recognize that what we put out in the digital world, stays out in the digital world. Jeff Grabill concurs:
“We have to help students learn how to deal with the fact that their audience is
immediate, that they can publish with the push of a button. That the time lag between
writing and audience feedback is almost instantaneous. That changes the rhetorical
situation. It changes how we think about writing and how we do it. We have to recognize
and acknowledge and make visible as part of our learning environments the fact that
people are using digital witting today to do all sorts of remarkable things. They’re
starting social movements, they’re making art and sharing it. They are changing the world
right now, today. And some of those people are our students. We could learn a little bit
from them” (Grabill).
Of this audience, the inhabitants in the digital world are nameless and faceless.
Additionally, audience isn’t a singular object as denoted by names on a Following or Followed by List, but something that is more fluid, and rapidly changing, and often brings together “groups of people they do not normally bring together, such as acquaintances, friends, co-workers, and family” (Marwick and boyd 9). Regardless, when our students are online in their various social media, they, “have a sense of audience in every mediated conversation, whether on instant messenger or though blog comments. This audience is often imagined and constructed by an 61 individual in order to present themselves appropriately, based on technological affordances and immediate social context” (Marwick and boyd 2). In contrast, our classrooms are more static, even if they are temporary. Even though student and instructor are face to face for a number of hours each week, students will have trouble imagining audience beyond the instructor at the head of the classroom. It’s odd that students have such a difficult time with this, but there is a generational gap that cannot be ignored. At this point in history we have a group of instructors who were born before, or right at the cusp of, the Internet Age, teaching students who have never known life without the World Wide Web. We are also quickly approaching the time where students will have never known life without social media. If anyone needs to adapt here, it’s not them.
Our students are the ones already living in those guerrilla communities. They have, perhaps without realizing it, adapted to an apocalyptic lifestyle. If educators go into the classroom understanding this, those unique abilities can be capitalized upon for the benefit of those students.
Michel de Certeau has an intriguing definition of strategy and tactics that can be well applied to little wars and apocalyptic thought. He says that a strategy is “the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships that becomes possible as soon as a subject with will and power can be isolated” (35-36). He makes parenthetical note that businesses, armies, and other large organizations fill this role. He cites three main points of division between places of power: autonomous place and time, mastery of place through spacial awareness, and the power of knowledge (36). This is, in the simplest terms, the big picture.
What I propose boils down to tactics. Michel de Certeau defines tactics as, “a calculated 62 action determined by the absence of a proper locus” and goes on to further explain that, “The space of a tactic is the space of the other. Thus it must play on and with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power” (37). A tactic, without a further plan, is a futile idea. The thought that tactics must focus on foreign power and terrain is accurate; a tactic is the means by which navigation through conflict can occur. Tactics in the plural are the means with which to gather information; intelligence. From there, strategies are born. I believe that what we do in our Composition classrooms is to provide tactics.
While Certeau claims that “a tactic is an art of the weak” (37), I claim that strategies cannot be fully realized without them. In order to gain greater understanding about any situation, it is necessary to enter that foreign situation and learn to identify and exploit all of the nuances of the previously unknown. If students cannot go to a foreign place and learn to play on that which is imposed on them, they will not be able to understand the greater picture. And if educators aren’t able to do the same, we can’t fulfill our duties. Blitz and Hurlburt said, “Our students come from different places with different experiences, but we can set our classrooms up in such a way that no one point of origin is valorized over another—no one discursive journey, no one discursive destination. Instead, students can explore varieties of composition processes, not to mention variety of end results” (143). Each person in a composition classroom has their own tactics, and their own rhetorical moves. Here, I am advocating the exact opposite of de Certeau, when he says that trickery or tactics degrade strategy; I believe that the use of tactics can help scaffold learning. Each tactic, or lesson, lays a foundation upon which students build, overlaying their own experiences and then developing strategies as they adapt to foreign situations like the academy, and independent life outside. 63
Each of these tactics and moves play into the larger picture. Each one is, when joined with others, part of a larger whole, and instead of trying to find solutions, perhaps we should choose instead to simply “appreciate the depth and breadth of the social pathologies with which our students are trying to grapple” (Lynch 460). Further, in our rapidly changing world, where,
“Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives can accordingly help us to unravel the contradictions and look beyond the possible breakdown of the current political, social, and economic order by providing the reader with visions in which familiar realities are destabilized and transformed” (Moon 10), sometimes learn we have to be reactionary, to try to build power from a position of weakness, using whatever tricks we can. Power is collected by the powerful, and the disenfranchised must seize wherever they can.
That’s what academics are for, to provide the tools necessary for younger generations to join and further create the world. If we, as citizens, are to move beyond issues of privilege and social bias, we have to face the ugliness head on. People have to accept the language given, and stop trying to whitewash it in academic tones. Instead, I think instructors need to work with students to identify audience and engage at those points, to stop shying away from writing about the difficult topics, and to claim ownership of their ideas. I know I’m not alone in this, since I’m finding the same points from the likes of Peter Elbow, David Bartholomae, Steven Pinker, and other scholars9. Looking at these names and reading their works tells me that these issues go beyond theoretical lines as well—there’s no division between the process theorists, social constructionists, or cognitivists here.
At the same time, I am not arguing against the use of academic language, or that students
9 Mary Lousie Pratt, bell hooks, Victor Villanueva, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and Kenneth A. Bruffee are just a few more names on an ever growing list. 64 don’t need to adopt the appropriate discourse when they enter the university. I do think, however, that academic discourse has room to grow. It is a language that has become more stagnant over the decades, and needs to be more inclusive in the face of recent social concerns. It’s time to move beyond that. Teaching students how to write is about teaching them to think and to question. Perhaps we should embrace the unknown and work toward training skeptics and fostering curiosity, skills that will serve not only our students, but the future both in the academy and out. Re-envisioning and reinventing is necessary for growth, and in this age of technology, perhaps we need to reinvent our approach to the “forgotten R,” as termed by Grabill. Perhaps we should think of the field anthropologically, culturally, “composing to understand one’s life and the lives of others, even to try to better the world” (Blitz and Hurlburt 143). If our students can come together, learn, and move on to grow in many different communities, then maybe the apocalypse will be something to embrace, not fear. 65
Epilogue
Back to the Beginning
I love playing with words. I love mixing five dollar words with slang. I speak this way to my students and with my friends. To a large degree, it’s language that is borrows from, but mostly sits outside of the traditional academic sphere (the perceived sphere — I know I am not alone in my use of relaxed language in the classroom). Composition is where we write about real things, so I prefer to show my students that they can use real language, though with a warning against anything that may be found in Urban Dictionary.
I am also an oddity in the English Department, having abandoned 140 pages of a creative non-fiction thesis that became more emotionally stressful than I was prepared to deal with, much less publish for the world to see (or, the three people who might have ever skimmed it in the library). I walked away from that program10, down the stairs, and into the Master of Teaching
Writing Program, where I learned that the way I’d been teaching First Year Composition, focusing on grammar and punctuation, was outdated and ineffective.
It didn’t take long before I realized that the field of Composition is a completely separate entity in English, and has little to do with grammar, spelling, and punctuation and everything to do with context and content. Further, learning theory and putting some of it into practice helped me to learn that these constraints I’d thought were normal, have their roots in classist systems that we are dealing with to this day. The dismantling of the systematic gatekeeping that is the academy helps to guide me in the classroom, using whatever means I have to give the students tools to think and write their way into adulthood.
10 I love the MLA program, and I love the classes I took while I was in it. My only problem was with my work, not the program itself. 66
The working title of this thesis came at the beginning of the Spring semester, in a
Facebook discussion group for the Pedagogy of Basic Writing class. One of my MTW cohort members was wondering if there would be a need for basic writing if writing was taught better in high schools. The topic blew up, and we began discussing the inequalities of education that we had been reading about and moved on to what we could do about it. Dr. Woodworth suggested
“Rethinking. Outside the box. Blowing up the box.” My next response was “Guerrilla
Composition.” It was as though a match had been struck, but after that initial flare, it began to sputter. What exactly did I mean by that statement? How was I to turn something that simple into my own guiding theory, much less a thesis? I knew I was on to something, so I did the only thing
I knew — I went back to the books and readings I’d been assigned.
There, in my Google drive, was the answer — an assigned piece by Paul Lynch, titled
“Composition’s New Thing: Bruno Latour and the Apocalyptic Turn.” When I first read Lynch’s essay, I was skeptical about the premise, but the news and scandals surrounding the election and subsequent policies enacted have caused me to change my mind. I’ve stood in front of my classes and have seen fear and concern on the faces of minority students. It scares me that their voices are being taken away before they ever have the chance to find them. And I’ve started questioning whether some of the things we are doing in our classrooms are the best way to teach these students to engage in composition practices that will actually matter in the long run. We can watch our students approximate language, to invent the university, as Bartholomae coined it, but I am not sure anymore whether that’s enough.
Lynch suggests that “the field does seem to be thinking more and more about what composition ought to do in the face of serious dangers to human flourishing” and that the works 67 of a number of authors suggest that “economic disruption, endless violence, and, perhaps most important, environmental collapse should force us to reexamine what it means to work in the field of composition, and this reexamination should go to the very heart of what composition means” (Lynch 458). The meaning and purpose of composition is something that I had been considering since joining the MTW program. Through the study of theory, and my own experiences in the classroom, I’ve come to realize that composition is nothing like what the rest of the academy believes it to be. We aren’t necessarily teaching students how to write in the academy, but rather, how to think and articulate those thoughts.
The history of the field of composition is widely discussed, so a rehashing of it is wholly unnecessary. Suffice it to say, professionals in the field are well aware of the racial and class challenges that have plagued composition and the entire academic system since the end of
WWII, and continue to do so today. While the academy, much like the rest of the world, is cyclic, those within realize that now, more than ever, the liberal arts education so widely touted throughout history is in danger.
The liberal arts education system is out of sync with the rest of the world, and instead of overhauling the system, it sets back and lets the world revolve around it. Now, the academy is under scrutiny from those who believe that higher education isn’t as important as it’s made out to be, and in fact runs counter to some widely held belief systems. When we combine this with the ever rising tuition costs and the epidemic that is the student loan system, it’s no surprise that people are angry.
Bottom line, the academy is going through its own apocalypse, and has been for years.
The question is, what, if anything, can educators do about it? Should we do anything at all, 68 except for ride it out with our students, and see what happens on the other side?
I consider my own theory to be a mix of process and social constructionism. I appreciate the conversation between Peter Elbow and David Bartholomae and agree almost equally with both of their sentiments. I also don’t think that there is as clear a division between both of them as some might believe. Adding to this is my recent foray into ideas of the apocalyptic turn, and how we can blend process and social construction into something that will help navigate the drastic social and political climate and create a narrative that transcends hate.
This thesis is the culmination of my own personal apocalypse and my foray into guerrilla composition. 69
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Appendix A
Literacy Narrative Assignment
Description:
For this assignment, you will write a literacy narrative. Quite often, a literacy narrative is an account of a situation that helped you develop as a writer. One such situation would be how the actions of a parent or teacher had a significant effect on how you approach writing today.
You will write a narrative account of one particular situation that you now understand had an influence on how you view writing, language use, or reading. Tell the full story in detail.
When did this happen and where? Who was involved? What happened? How did it affect you then, and how does it affect you now? Why do you think it affected you in this way?
This is more than a back and forth conversation. Paint a picture. Try to make your audience feel like they are there. Consider details that most people take for granted.
If you are writing about a negative experience, keep in mind that you must keep your credibility and authority when discussion the situation. Don’t devolve into finger pointing and name calling, no matter how tempting and cathartic is might be.
Conversely, if you are writing about a positive experience, don’t rely too much on emotions to make your point.
Understand that this is not a five paragraph essay. Tell the whole story, no matter how many paragraphs you use.
Remember, you will be writing about ONE experience. This is not an exercise in telling how many incidents affected you, or the story of your experience throughout school.
Your writing process will include brainstorming, where you will think about any incidents 75 you can. From there you will choose one of them and begin outlining all that happened. After you have created your outline, you will write a rough draft that will be at least 60% of the total length of your final paper. You will conduct a peer review with your classmates, and, using their feedback (as well as mine), you will make the necessary revisions and additions to your final draft.
When your paper is complete and turned in, you will create a thread on Twitter, of no fewer than 15 tweets (there is no maximum), about your narrative. We will discuss how to do this and why we are doing this. We will also discuss how to make good rhetorical choices that highlight your narrative. You will be allowed to create this thread in class before posting it. It will take the place of one weekly writing assignment.