{"id":36,"date":"2009-11-09T22:39:42","date_gmt":"2009-11-10T02:39:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/2009\/11\/09\/what-some-academics-hate-twittter-part-1\/"},"modified":"2009-11-11T11:41:18","modified_gmt":"2009-11-11T15:41:18","slug":"what-some-academics-hate-twittter-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/2009\/11\/09\/what-some-academics-hate-twittter-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Some Academics Hate Twittter, Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Location: Puritan Cleaners<\/strong><\/p>\n

Please explain to me why my dry-cleaners has has Twitter Feed<\/a> and a Facebook page. Now, I can see how a program like “Coats for Kids” could benefit from the added cheer-leading that a few well-chosen tweets provide.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, as a reluctant and recent Twitterer, I feared that Puritan is drifting from the stolidity of their New-England namesakes and was falling prey to the Gartner Group’s hype cycle<\/a> for new technologies. Second Life users know this well. We SLers are climbing out of stage 3, the “Trough of Disillusionment” and staggering up stage 4, “The Slope of Enlightenment.”<\/p>\n

Three years ago, Puritan would have a created a storefront in SL. They are clearly riding high on stage 1, “The Peak of Inflated Expectations.”<\/p>\n

Yes, and SL was to make all of us zillionaires selling…um, something…in 2006, just as protologyinthehome.com would in 1999.<\/p>\n

Such hyperbole is antithetical to the academic mind, with its rather staid manner of vetting every source, considering every point, and taking one’s time to say a whole lot, lest one be labeled a dilettante.<\/p>\n

We profs don’t look kindly on dabblers. And Twitter is a technology of dabbling, of telling one’s circle what one had for lunch or other minutiae. Consider my last two tweets:<\/p>\n