Text-first broadcast sites are social media platforms that operate similarly to the site formerly known as Twitter. These platforms limit the amount of text a user can share per post (though each platform has a different limit), with text preceding any images. Following Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (since renamed to “X”), multiple similar sites have sprung up to serve audiences who opted to leave X for practical, political, or personal reasons after the ownership change. These include Threads (connected to Instagram, now owned by Facebook), Bluesky, Mastodon, and others.
The social media landscape has shifted radically in the past decade. Controversies over corporate ownership, lack of transparency, failure of platforms to control proliferating misinformation and hate speech, the involvement of AI and bots, partisanship and political affiliation, and other issues have made these platforms a much more ethically problematic environment. However, text-first broadcast platforms remain a major site for public dissemination of information and for community discussion and have remained major platforms for academic scholars, the literary community, journalists, and a wide variety of other sectors to rapidly share information.
Text-first broadcasts can provide students an opportunity to hone a concise, informative public voice, as well as to begin considering some of the ethical and practical considerations inherent to public discourse in the digital age.
Methods:
In this assignment, students create a “thread” on a given scholarly topic. Much like scholarly essay style, text-first broadcast threads rely on a close interplay of evidence and analysis. In a thread, however, each evidence/analysis pair is often contained within a single post. For these reasons, a thread can serve as good training in scholarly thinking and writing. However, threads are written in public-facing diction, avoiding jargon and keeping language simple.
Threads are created by making an initial post, then repeatedly replying to one’s own post, creating a long, nested sequence. Students will ideally create an account on a text-first broadcast site if they do not have one, in order to become familiar with the style. However, they need not actually post their thread if privacy is a concern.
A good post on a text-first broadcast social media site is concise but conversational. Even within a thread, individual posts should be able to stand alone, so they can be individually reposted. Audiences engage more with shorter posts (140 words or less) than longer ones.
Images are important to individual tweets. Evidence – whether a visual (including graphs, art, photos, etc) or a quote – can be provided as an image, with the text providing the analysis.
Examples
In the following article, Dan Chiasson describes how Homer translator and scholar Emily Wilson used Twitter to connect to a contemporary scholarly and general public.
Wilson has left X and now posts on Bluesky @emilyrcwilson.bsky.social, but her former Twitter threads are archived on her website. Here is a highly effective Emily Wilson tweetstorm or thread, originally posted on Twitter but now provided as a PDF on her website, on violence against women, The Odyssey, and challenges in translation:
Some key features to Wilson’s thread:
- Ties in to a contemporary issue (International Women’s Day, #IWD2018).
- Provides quotes of texts and experts. Then, in a following tweet, gives concise scholarly analysis.
- Develops an argument and ends strong, concluding with a discussion of ethics.
Wilson’s website provides additional threads and her substack provides free content, such as the public facing article Translating the beginning of the Odyssey: 4 ways.
For scientists, the following good example threads remain on X:
- Matto Mildenberger – Tragedy of the Commons
- Katherine Hayhoe –
- Jesse Jenkins – Carbon Pricing
Also, for any scholarly discipline: Shelly Lundberg – Sexism in the Academy
Learning Goals
- Use of text-first broadcast social media as a scholarly public discourse platform.
- Concision and impactful word choice.
- Engagement with an interplay of evidence and analysis.
- Consideration of ethical concerns on social media platforms.
Suggestions for Multimedia Expansion
A tweetstorm can be readily linked to a long-form blog post (see WORDPRESS BLOGS AND WEBSITES). It can both serve as a teaser and enhance web traffic, or prompt public discussion, of that post. It can also be readily expanded into a standard college essay, or vice versa, as it relies on evidence-analysis pairs.
Students who publish in the mainstream press and who frequent a text-based broadcast platform can also be encouraged to do a tweetstorm discussion or summary of their longer published work (see NEWS ARTICLES).
