The Academic Essay: Twitter has ruined me

I finished the article I was working on, the one I had put aside because I had missed the deadline. Turns out I  was able to submit the paper late. So I've been trying to drag the article out of my brain, kicking and screaming for the past four days. I've been thinking and reading and researching and outlining the paper for a few months now, but the writing this time around has been the most difficult part. Much more difficult than I am used to. And part of the reason is Twitter.

Part of the reason I had so much trouble is because I could expand, in fact my brain actively resisted and rebelled against expanding, a fairly simply concept (history has been unkind and unfair to Black women) into 2-5 pages of theoretical whatever that I know I need to have to make it an acceptable academic essay. It was so hard. Why, my brain kept insisting, do we have to do this? Why? Is anyone really going to argue with you on this point? I didn't realize that was my problem until I tweeted that I was having a problem. I thought it was because I was having trouble dealing with the non-linear structure of the narrative. Nope, I was able to tweet out exactly what each part should be and in what order. The problem was I was more comfortable tweeting it out in 140 characters than expanding it to 20-25 pages.

I'm pretty sure Mark Bauerlein would point to this and say "I told you so," along with a number of other luddites (my husband included). But I have to ask the question, is this really a bad thing? I mean, sure, it's terrible for my career because you don't get tenure based on tweets. But looking at the larger picture, is this not an example of thinking differently about how we share our research? Why is the research paper the gold standard? Reducing years of research to a handful of tweets might be a bit extreme, but I really wish sometimes that there were other outlets for my research that were recognized by academia. Outlets that were more accessible and more reasonable in their demands.

I think, however, that Bauerlein might agree with me that the explosion of research publications has made it almost impossible to "keep up" and write a reasonable five pages as an intro or theoretical grounding for your essay. It has lead to the use of a small handful of theorists in everyone's work, lest we appear we know what we're talking about (I'm writing on postcolonialism, I quote Spivak). Part of my difficulty also came from the fact that I was completely unsure I had done enough "research" for the opening section, but I knew I knew enough for Twitter. I couldn't get into the writing because I could give up on the researching and reading.

We keep putting more and research out there and keep demanding more and more research still. It's beginning to get inhuman. Maybe at the end of the day, that's what my brain was railing against.