Much chatter about Twitter after Elon Musk bought it for $44 billion. Who knows what’s next, but for now I’m sticking with the platform that serves as my diary and a grab bag for many of the things I care about.
Cite as: Kamoun, S. (2022). Je tweete, donc je suis — Why I’m sticking with Twitter. Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7296790
Lisez des livres!! Read books!!
A stroll along Paris’ Quais de la Seine on a sunny summer afternoon is a pleasant journey of random discovery. The Quais are famous for their bouquinistes, the second-hand booksellers that will sell you anything from classics to pop magazines. It’s a wonder how such business can still be viable in the age of Amazon and its popular Kindle, but they seem as permanent as the water that flows through the Seine river. Perhaps, that’s the sentiment that this sign — perched on one of the bouquiniste’s display — meant to convey: “Lisez des lives!! Ça vous évitera de croire tout ce que l’on vous tweete!!” In other words, “books are more reliable than tweets”, they are a guarantee of dependable and trustworthy information in the age of fake news and social media.
Are books more truthful than tweets?
One of the books I spotted in the summer of 2022 on one of those Paris strolls was John Steinbeck’s literature classic “Of Mice and Men”. The rather grim novella tells the story of two characters George Milton and Lennie Small who struggle through life amid the United States Great Depression of the 1930s. John Steinbeck lived in central California — where his books are generally based — and lived in Pacific Grove, right next to the legendary Asilomar Conference Grounds where the Fungal Genetics Conference takes place every couple of years. The area is peppered with references to Steinbeck and you can even rent his cottage on airbnb.
In recent times, I attended the Fungal Genetics Conference with my friend and colleague Sebastian Schornack. To my surprise, Seb told me that he was required to read Steinbeck’s classic in school. I was puzzled because Seb grew up in the former East Germany — aka DDR or Deutsche Demokratische Republik — before the fall of the Berlin Wall on Thursday 9 November 1989 and the subsequent German reunification. The last thing I expected was that the book of a celebrated US novelist would be required reading in a stern communist country.
It turned out that the required reading of Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” was part of a propaganda ploy. The book was used to illustrate how immoral Western life was and the terrible ordeals experienced by Western workers under harsh and heartless capitalism, in sharp contrast to the rosy lives of their Eastern comrades, of course.
It’s the message, not the medium
The message, whether conveyed in a book, a newspaper, a tweet or a blog, may diverge from reality to the point of being totally unhinged from truth. Does the medium matter? Yes, of course the volume and amplification of misinformation through social media makes a difference, but incorrect information is everywhere. Look at the debate on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, whether the virus started through a leak from a lab or transmitted to humans via an intermediate animal host. The discussion on any media, social or otherwise, has degenerated to a chaotic shouting match to the point that it’s difficult to take anyone seriously. Even peer-reviewed scientific papers published by supposedly leading journals obfuscate critical information. Meanwhile, we still lack essential information about the early days of the pandemic and, therefore, the various theories remains just that, theories.
At the end of the day it’s you the reader who has to use critical thinking to evaluate the information. It will be naïve to treat pre-digital era books as reliably more truthful than say a random tweet. What we need is critical thinking. This is what needs to be taught in school. The only prescription against the fake news madness is education and a hefty dose of skepticism. Carl Sagan already knew this years ago when he developed The Baloney Detection Kit, a set of rules for critical thinking and calling out bullshit.
Fakes news in the newspapers
I grew up thinking highly of journalism as an idealistic job of passionate professionals who uncover the truth and enlighten readers with alternative perspectives. Sadly, journalists have been ran over by journos— corporate types more interesting in propaganda than truth. Check this short collection of journalistic nonsense and judge for yourself. Blaming social media is just too easy. Mainstream media journos instead of calling out fake news, often give it a stamp of approval. This study concluded that misinformation is more likely due to ordinary news outlets or simply the avoidance of news rather than the blatantly fake news that everyone seems concerned with.
To lose faith in journalism all you need to do is read a newspaper article about a topic you know well. Most of the time, I’m flabbergasted by the obvious errors. It certainly makes me wonder about the quality of the articles on topics I don’t know anything about. Sometimes, you don’t need to be an expert to judge this type of information, just being able to read english is enough. Check this spectacular example from the Daily Mail. Even though the scientific article concluded that “no significant sequence similarity (to toxins) was detected,” the newspaper headline translated this to “toxic gene hiding in GM crops…” And they always seem to find some scientist to interview about these crazy stories (more on the role of scientists in the science crisis below).
The point is, we don’t need Twitter for fake news. The traditional media is doing just fine with their attention-grabbing and click-bait propagandist enablers. If anything, Tweeps tend to do a good job calling out fake news in the traditional media. Ironic isn’t it that the above newspaper article got called out on Twitter and not in any of the traditional media? In fact, the journos and their editors were nowehere to be seen when called out for their fake article.
How do you find the time to tweet
The question comes up frequently, “why are you so active on Twitter? How do you find the time?”. Many academics feel overwhelmed and don’t understand how one can free up the time to fool around on social media (or write blog posts like this). My first answer is that I find Twitter fun. Twitter time has been part of the time I allocate myself as part of the Shuffle time management strategy I described before. Because Twitter time is optional, it becomes more fun than dealing with chores like email and all the other stuff I have to do. My day consists of shuffling between the must-do stuff — what I get paid to do — and the other “fun” stuff like Twitter and blogging.
And by the way, all this fun stuff is far from useless waste of time. As I wrote in an earlier post:
“Serendipity plays an important role in academia. I wouldn’t advise eliminating the many activities that tend to be viewed as not important and not urgent. Otherwise, you’ll probably never chat with a colleague about some random bit of science, you will not read papers outside your field, you will not bother with Twitter etc. And you will miss a lot. Not just in accessing useful bits of knowledge, but also in creating situations where unexpected impactful opportunities have the potential to arise and transform your work and career.”
Why Twitter
Twitter has been a great platform to share, learn and make new friends. What inspires me about my job is knowledge and people. I love that incessant flow of information you get through Twitter and the interactions with a wide network of people, not just other academics. In a way, I’m addicted to knowledge and social interactions, and Twitter is my drug.
I find social media to be a democratizing and liberating source of information. It fits well with the view that openness and transparency are critical to inclusivity and building trust within communities. As a scientist, I have a critical mind and I don’t blindly trust experts. Besides the fact that I want to understand the evidence behind any claim, I’m too much aware of the #ScienceCrisis we are facing. I’ve seen too many experts behaving badly to offer them my blind trust. If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, check this coverage of the photoshop crisis of data manipulation we have in science. Scientists behaving badly, whether it’s intentional or not, is sadly a fact. Consider also how expert virologists and others in the scientific community have tolerated incredibly poor standards of data reporting in the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. We can’t just rely on anonymous peer-reviewers and conflicted experts. We need an open debate on the serious issues. Twitter enables that. It doesn’t always work well, but it’s better than any alternative. And, in my view, it’s better than blind trust in “arguments from authority”, as Carl Sagan eloquently highlighted in his Baloney Detection Kit.
What I tweet…
This often surprises people, but I’ve been tweeting first of all because I use Twitter as my open online diary. I tweet whatever stuff I come across that I find interesting. This can be cool science or it can be anything inspiring, intriguing, funny, and so on. I’m a hunter-gatherer of information. I’m continuously hunting for knowledge and gathering stuff off my Twitter feed. Twitter allows me to effortlessly document and store all those interesting bits I come across. It happens that, occasionally, they can be of interest to others. But that’s not a question I ask before I tweet.
There is another reason why I use Twitter as my diary. It’s so easy to retrieve information from the bizillions of tweets. And I simply love the idea that I can at anytime retrieve years-old information. Say, I’m thinking of flowers. Then a quick Twitter search of my feed will yield a couple of dozen tweets. Need to refresh my mind about anything related to bananas (hey, I’m a plant biologist okay), then in just a few seconds Twitter will yield an eclectic list. In fact, in the course of writing this post, I searched Twitter perhaps a dozen times.
I just love this retrieval function of Twitter that allows me at any time to tap into an amazing grab bag of memories, bits of knowledge, inspiring quotes and much more. Feeling stressed? Then nothing beats my #momentofzen videos to relax and travel back to those amazing moments I was fortunate enough to experience. Feeling hungry? Here is the #MedFood posts to further wet your appetite.
Je tweete, donc je suis
By the time I’m publishing this post, Elon Musk must have fully completed the takeover of Twitter. My Twitter shares have now converted into cash at an appreciably higher rate than the market would have valued them — thank you Elon! —meaning that I have some spare cash to pay him that $8 monthly fee he’s coveting. Why not? Twitter has served me well all these years, and Elon Musk has promised intriguing tweaks to the platform, such as improving the search function, which I use so often.
There are of course concerns about a recrudescence of fake news on Twitter, with rumours that Musk has fired the curation team in charge of blocking misinformation on the platform. Future will tell. For now, I’m hanging tight and I hope Musk will not break this wonderful platform that had given me much over more than a dozen years of 60,000 tweets and ~3 Gigabytes of data.
On Twitter, I shared news, met people, learned amazing stuff, hired people, had many laughs, started new projects, made friends, promoted my work, got called out, helped build communities, annoyed a few people, reached out to early career colleagues, made mistakes, got inspired, inspired others, got bullied, shared my ideas, got irritated, interacted with people I would have never met, met school teachers etc. Basically, I have been living part of my adult life on Twitter. And I love it.
As René Descartes wrote in 1637, “Je tweete, donc je suis / I tweet, therefore I am.”
Addendum
One important point that has not gone through in this post is just how much humor is on Twitter. Anywhere from Oded Rechavi’s sarcastic takes on academic life to random stuff like this take on a 1958 photo of the beatles “defending a free-kick.” And let’s not forget all those funny tweets about cats and dogs.
Acknowledgments
I thanks Saskia Hogenhout, Sébastian Schornack and all the tweeps who helped shape my thoughts on this topic.
