I apologize for my long absence. It has taken me nine months to learn to type a ƿynn. (Srsly.) Armed with this crucial information, I will now continue blogging here in my capacity as a PhD student (not so much Twitter aficionado—sorry, masses). I’ve uploaded my CV and a brief outline of my dissertation project as I currently conceive it.

Watch this space going forward. (Srsly.) By the way, are you ready to be who you are?

Love,

yalebot

As I sat in my kitchen, icing my knee with a bag of frozen peas and pondering the inanity of thieving e-content, only to immediately (re)publish it on another WordPress blog and (inadvertently?) alert the original author by creating a temporary trackback link to the thieved work (!)—as I sat there, the answer to a three-day-long puzzle I’ve been working on came galumphing right outta the air. It went something like this (angels sing):

requited him with words long treasured up

What, you’re not jumping up and down? OK, so two moons ago I began a translation into iambic pentameter of the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf. Although I have yet to find a replacement for Angelina Jolie, I have scripted a killer trailer. I just need $20 million in electronics and some crack cocaine.

The translation has had its joys and its pitfalls (mostishly joys), but I have yet to be stucker than I was at line 259, which, in the original, reads:

werodes wisa     wordhord onleac
troop’s leader     wordhoard unlocked

The problem with this famous expression wasn’t the language itself—I understand the literal meaning, and it’s one of my favorite moments in the poem. The as-yet unnamed hero of the flick blockbuster thing, Beowulf, has landed on the shores of Denmark, and is about to deliver a characteristically courteous yet strong-willed reply to the Danish coast guard who has confronted the Geats (Beowulf’s troop) as they disembark to head inland toward Hrothgar and Heorot.

The problem was, ironically, the strength and depth of the poetic idiom. How to render this unlocking of the wordhoard, with all of its facets, into idiomatic Modern English? Existing translations, as I soon found, were no help. They all either slavishly reproduce the literal meaning, engendering an unsightly archaicism (“unlocked his wordhoard” or “unlocked his treasury of words”), or skip the metaphor altogether (“replied”). As is the bent of my larger project in the translation, I wanted to find a ModE equivalent of the sentiment, and that meant an expression equivalent in poetic terms as well.

To this end, after authoring countless failures, I did what any obsessive analytic thinker does. I hunkered down and wrote a list—in this case, a list of the implications of the wordhord metaphor as I saw it.

1. Beowulf’s words are precious. Scholars have argued that the economy of speeches in Beowulf parallels the economy of gifts, a prominent motif in much Anglo-Saxon epic poetry. The poem implicitly values the substance of what Beowulf has to say, and his gift of the speech itself as an action and a response.

2. Beowulf’s speech is a reply. (Line 258 reads:

him se yldesta     andswarode
him the eldest     answered

and so it is important to render the two lines in such a way as to make it clear that this is a direct response.

3. Beowulf’s act of speechifying is a kind of publication. onleac (=unlocked) gives the sense of a hidden treasury suddenly flung open. I didn’t want to lose that connotation, either, because it underscores the rhetorical force of the reply. I actually fooled around with the verbs published and proclaimed for a while, but those seemed too strong and impersonal for such a passionately diplomatic utterance as Beowulf’s.

I believe my solution is ideal in these three respects. The language needs some tweaking, and the syntax right now is a little more old-fashioned than most of the rest of the translation, but overall it’s a workable improvement on my previous attempts. As always I appreciate your thoughts/criticisms/wholesale theft.

The key: on Twitter, attention is the new money. For celebrities and grey-hat “mavens,” Twitter is an extremely efficient tool for converting attention (our attention!) into clicks. This is why new users are all but forced to follow celebs. (If you take a smoogle at @aplusk’s followers, something like 1/3 of them are fresh off the e-boat and haven’t even uploaded an avatar yet. These people didn’t really opt in, they just failed to opt out.) Moreover, attention on Twitter is more or less a one-way street. As on Google, the poor stay poor while the rich get richer.

For the savvy attention-rich, it’s one small step from clicks to dollars or other tangible results. Just ask any of the companies with large Twitter followings. Just ask Dave Chapelle. Just ask Barack Hussein Obama. Monetization isn’t just about money, it’s about any of the things money can buy.

Conversely, if you’re not leveraging your following in some tangible way, you may be squandering the sizeable opportunity cost of the hours spent on the service. Don’t get me wrong, I won’t quit tweetating anytime soon, but I’m currently off from school. If I had a 9-to-5—or, especially, if I ran my own business—I would think twice about whether my time spent on Twitter was worth it.

The recent monetization hubbub reeks of hypocrisy, because the people shouting the loudest are already making bank off of unsuspecting users’ clickification. What they’re really saying is, “I hope Twitter creates another, better way for me to exploit clickiness.”

Here are 3 ways to optimize the amount of daily attention you pay:

1. Only follow interesting people. Simple. Follow people whose ideas enrich your vita in some way. Never be afraid to unfollow someone who is a daily drain on your attention.

2. Learn to avoid sneaky linkage. Because of the ubiquity of short URLs on Twitter, it’s super-easy to slap a tempting teaser on some random ad. When you are suckered into clicking on a worthless link, unfollow the linker and take a moment to assess how you might identify this kind of spam in the future.

3. Create a mini-group on TweetDeck. As your following grows, it becomes increasingly inefficient to individually vet each new follower. Solution: create a group of your favorite Tweeters on TweetDeck. You can then add and remove people from this internal group on the fly, without hurting any feelings, and your stream will stay clean and sharp as your following blossoms. Delete your “All Friends” column and never look back.

(Note for my literary/poet peoples: have no fear, a blog post on translating Beowulf is in the works for tonight.)

Arts University College at Bournemouth Press. What a Bournemouthful! Anyway, this account tweets occasionally (last tweet at time of writing: June 1st) about, you guessed it, AUCB press; whoever updates it also has the annoying habit of writing the updates in old-school Facebook style, with the verb first and no subject, e.g., “Is celebrating!”

Cambridgebooks. Not sure about the purpose of this one. It looks like a general account for Cambridge University Press but it only has four updates and they stopped in June.

Cambridge University Press (NY). The Twitter account for Cambridge U.P.’s Tribeca branch. Tweets lots of links of all kinds. Very good discussions with followers. Also plugs C.U.P.’s blog on occasion.

Cambridge University Press (Library). The Library and Electronic products division of CUP, updated by someone named M. Duncan. Some banter, some relevant links; other involvement in the community—covered #ala2009, for example.

Columbia University Press. Microblogs on everything from their own titles to world news.

Duke University Press. Tweets links to academic/publishing/literary content, as well as occasionally promoting their own wares. Follows a lot of tweeters and has impeccable tweetiquette—they’ve been at this for 690 tweets now, making them older than me on Twitter!

Harvard Press. Tweets about their own titles and national and world issues relating to the genres they publish, especially world history. Not interactive with their followers (only follows 175 at time of writing although thousands follow them).

Indiana University Press. Tweets top U.P. stories and other interesting tidbits from the world of publishing, writing, and higher ed.—all sprinkled with hilariously irreverent personal tweets from the unnamed updater.

Johns Hopkins University Press. Passes along interesting links, mostly related to publishing at large, sometimes related to JHUP titles and authors.

MIT Press. Tweets about itself and also provides a few interesting links, mostly restricted to the Cambridge area and the publishing biz.

New York University Press. Shoots out links to their stuff, and articles within the lit/publishing niche.

Oxford University Press (blog). Not sure if OUP has any other account besides this one, which is the account for their blog. Run by someone named Rebecca, @oupblog tweets a variety of links and observations broadly relating to publishing and literary culture. Pretty interactive with its followers, too.

Princeton University Press. Tweets interesting links, esp. related to the press. X-posts the Princeton U. P. blog. Has been known to cackle maniacally:

The human element.

Teachers College Press. More of a personal flavor than a business one here, e.g. June 18th’s offering, “squinting out the window to see if it is currently raining.” Also passes along great links on high tech in higher education, other U.P.’s, and of course its own happenings.

University of Arizona Press. Very active tweeter. Only occasionally posts AZP-related tweets: mostly engaged with followers and passing on interesting links, like any Twitizen!

University of British Columbia Press. Just tweets proprietary stuff.

University of California Press. Mostly sticks to proprietary links and info, with a few general-interest articles mixed in.

University of Hawaii Press. ALL CAPS username and almost 100% self-promotion.

University of Michigan Press. Very new (7 tweets at time of writing). So far only advertising their site.

University of Minnesota Press. Links to interesting publishing-related news items, often with comments/opinions. Occasional @replies to followers and other presses.

University of North Carolina Press (blog). Mostly a feed of the UNC Press Blog, peppered with @replies and some pretty weird tweets about the UNC Press office and a cricket that may or may not reside there. Overseen by one Ellen.

University of Ottawa Press. Updated by Marc-André Girouard, an employee. Basically tweets about UO Press. (Surprise!)

University of Pennsylvania Press. Mostly tweets about its own doings: readings/book signings, new titles, new blog posts.

University Press of Kentucky. Posts links that are of more general interest (national and world news, &c.) in addition to publishing related links. Not that much about the actual Press’s adventures. Beautiful horse background.

University of Toronto Press. Posts links to UTP authors and books, with the occasional Chronicle of Higher Ed screed thrown in for good measure.

Yale Press. Mostly links to posts at the Yale Press blog, and news relating to Yale titles. Not following many others.

Tweet this list.

(Leave a comment if I left out any UP’s, and I’ll update the list.)

Yesterday I read this bloggung by Jeff Sexton at GrokDotCom, identifying a Twitter crisis (essentially, spam) and laying out three possible paths for Twitter going forward: (1) Twitter adapts; (2) Twitter users adapt; or (3) DER TOD (that’s German for “Aw, shit” and ought to be spoken in a low rasp).

This got me thinking, Aren’t Queens of the Stone Age just so underrated? The self-described “robot rockers” have all but cornered the market on intelligent modal hard rock. Here’s the entirety of their live performance at the 2005 Eurockéennes:

Then I thought, Wait, isn’t there some analogy for Twitter I keep bringing up? Oh, right. Medieval manuscripts.

Sexton’s either/or dichotomy is a false one: Twitter has technical responsibilities to its users, and its users have a social responsibility to the service, and both types of responsibilities are integral to its survival. In delectable Bulletpunktform, I present below what Twitter could learn from studying the history of medieval manuscript transmission:

1. Code for concision. Over centuries of manuscripting, medieval scribes developed an intricate system of abbreviations. Twitter’s users are getting pretty good at this already, but the Twitter management also needs to build more concision into the framework of the service. For instance, why don’t we have a retweet button yet? The space wasted citing Twitter sources could be returned to us if Twitter made retweets a type of tweet and listed sources in the grey auto-text below each tweet (as is the case now with replies).

In the Beowulf MS, a macron over a final vowel stands for m.

2. Don’t change too much. Sexton: as a result of its successes, there are now spammers on Twitter. Rest of internet: join the club. Manuscript production in Europe survived essentially unchanged from the time of the fall of the Roman empire up to the invention of the printing press. Twitter has always been about naked simplicity; don’t combat new problems by opening up new cans of worms, like Facebook does. And never introduce new aspects to the service just for the buzz—oh, like Facebook does.

3. Write a better page-turning button. The “more” button just has to go. I understand the impulse to obscure the “past” on Twitter. (I even tweeted in praise of it once.) But either do away with pastness altogether (dubious), or come up with a more useful function. And a faster one! Turning the pages of a manuscript caught on in late antiquity, right around the beginning of the reign of Diocles (knew it!), and it has only gained popularity since then, forming a solid pageturnlich foundation on which was built the entirety of modern page-turning as we know it.

To sum up: medieval page-turning was easy. Practically effortless. Then bookbinding and the printing press had to go and make everything so complicated and Danish Norwegian:

4. Always remember that you’re a service. In the words of the great Fake Steve Jobs, your “product” (Twitter) is actually a service, not a product. Like macroblogging. Like manuscripts. Like taking a walk in the rain. The dictates of scriptoria were the medieval equivalent of branding campaigns, and how did that work out? We got a millenium of Christian homilies, followed by a century or two in which the Bible was the only book in print. (“Let’s see, we have it in black, black, and…”) Twitter, it’s not your job to be the scriptorium, so back off. Let users drive the innovation. There’s no “i” in service. Well, fuck, you know what I mean.

Modernity recuperated this ancient aesthetic, favoring the baroque in art, architecture, literature, and philosophy, and finding its apotheosis in the bourgeoisie, a class defined by its constant striving toward abundance. As a result of a series of horrifying imperial campaigns, the populations of the dominant societies, having quelled the imminent threats to their existence, boomed. Though warfare had undergone considerable development since antiquity, modern wars still pitted abundance against abundance. The Cold War in particular stood as the epitome of the modern war: silent, nebulous, frenetic, an arms race, a population race, and a propaganda contest. The norms and institutions that survived the modern wars can in good faith be characterized as “the shit that stuck.”

In both of these periods, everyday life, normalized by the routines of the middle and upper classes, was comprised of a series of maximizations (of shelter, food, company, connections).

How different was the medieval view! In the literary and spiritual economy of the monastery, sparseness paradoxically emerged as a productive force. Sequestered in their chambers, scattered across Europe, monks composed perhaps a few manuscripts a year, dedicating most of their time to prayer. In comparison to antiquity, the medieval literary achievements that have come down to us are minuscule and fragmented. That is their charm.

Medieval religion was also centered on sparseness in a spiritual sense. The ascetic impulse was fundamentally an impulse to sparseness, and the notorious convolutions of medieval theology recall in their profusion, not the baroque musings of the ancients, but a kind of grim grasping-at-straws. The finely illustrated initial of a particularly lucky manuscript is nothing more than an envoi to color before neat rows of drab script painstakingly copied over.

Postmodernity, as well, was founded on the virtues of sparseness. The first thoroughgoing postmodern masterpieces in each art form were minimalist. One thinks of Mallarmé, Judd, Cage, Gabellini. Even as postmodern forms proliferate and complexify, the impulse to sparseness remains a motivating principle. On Twitter, for example, an extremely sparse hypertextual landscape emerges from what is essentially a conduit for pure noise. (Recall that the top 10% of active Twitterers account for over 90% of all tweets.)

If we have learned anything from the supersaturation of the last 500 years, it is the importance of knowing our limits. The putative limits of knowledge, art, and faith have undergirded every dialogue in human history. The internet, television, and others hallmarks of our contemporary lifestyle test the limits of our attention, proving over and over the supremacy of quality over quantity. The world does not need another Beowulf, or ten more medieval homilies. What little of merit remains from the Middle Ages, and what little of merit is created in postmodernity, is quite enough. In the age of the widget, it is depth of knowledge and focus of attention that solve problems, not 500 more half-baked reality shows.

This has the potential to become the Wikipedia of bookstore recommendations. (Actually, I am considering renaming the map Wikibibliotheque.) On this kind of user-sourced map, the private routines of individuals are published directly as recommendations; the research that would go into an analogous corporate project is instead expressed as life experience; and instead of a commercial catchphrase, or, worse, the store’s own slogans, the map offers user-generated tags and annotations.

Conversely, the map scores the immensity of Earth with flavorful pointers. Even if you have never been to Greenport, NY (or the Western Hemisphere), its reality for you is assured by my having uploaded markers for two local bookstores.

Viewed as a sort of geographical poetry, this database is pre-eminently unmodern, substituting indexicality for narrative, and an overt representational system (the map) for biographical verisimilitude.

If this takes off, I may consider other ways to collect and publish the information. (It has, for instance, been suggested that the map ought to be integrated with other internet tools.) As always, your feedback is welcome.

The best kind of followers are the ones who actively follow you because they are already interested in what you have to say. Moreover, your social reach and your followership are not completely coterminous. Here are some simple ways to expand your Twitter network without following anyone.

1. Ask a question. Ask a provocative and open-ended question, and your followers will likely respond, publishing your handle for all of their followers to see. Make sure to tweet a follow-up or reply so your followers don’t feel like they’ve shouted their witty retort or considered advice into a void.

2. Recommend people on Friday using #ff or #followfriday. You will get a few thank-you tweets, but even more importantly, it shows would-be followers that you engage with your network. Best practice: add a specific reason to follow each user you recommend. Otherwise it just comes off as a random list of shout-outs.

3. Schedule tweets using FutureTweets or Twuffer. Sometimes you just have a lot to say. But habitually overloading your followers’ stream with 17 links in a row grows tiresome really quickly. Use these tweet-scheduling services to spread your non-time-sensitive tweets out across the day and into the future. This will help you connect with Tweeple all over the world, who have vastly different schedules from your own; it will bulk up your output when you are away or have tweeter’s block; and it will help keep your daily stream at a manageable trickle.

4. Participate in a Twitter chat. This is a fantastic way to meet new, targeted users. Don’t spam the chat, though: keep tweets on topic. If it’s a Q-and-A format, be sure to check out the original question before tweeting. And don’t get too chatty all at once, or you’ll lose some of the followers you already have!

5. Interact with your followers. Sounds basic, but you’d be surprised how many people neglect or abuse this facet of the Twitter conversation. When I am trying to determine whether to follow someone, I take a glance at their recent tweetstream. I’m looking for the following spread (you might have slightly different criteria): 25% mentions (@username); 25% links (retweeted or original); and 50% unlinked content (observations, jokes, complaints, updates). If I don’t see any mentions, or at least retweets, I can assume that this is someone who is only interested in broadcasting their own agenda on Twitter. There is no use following them unless the content they provide is unique (rare).

6. Tweet links and pictures. Twitter in and of itself is boring. There are a few really funny people, and you might be able to suffer occasional life-related updates from those in your immediate niche, or your friends, but beyond that, YAWN. Posting links and pictures extends the Twitter concept into the World Wide Web. Post whatever interests you; chances are, it will interest others, be retweeted a few times, and earn your handle five minutes of fame in your followers’ (and maybe some of their followers’!) streams.

7. Be funny. There are completely legitimate reasons to send out mundane tweets about your life. But as this post is about getting more followers, I will say: tweeting super-generic updates will not get you followers, and it may scare off some of the followers you already have. Tweeting is just like any other form of creative writing: if there’s no surprise in the writer, there will be no surprise in the readers. Done well, humor goes a lot farther than an update like this:

How to scare off potential followers.

If you can’t do funny, do interesting or outrageous.

8. Start a trend. Not necessarily a trending topic. It could be anything. A new account. A service. A chat. A Twibe. Stop thinking about Twitter as an external service, and start owning it. If you want something that doesn’t exist, make it. Twitter accounts are free to create; tweets are free to send. Try something out. Good news spreads quickly everywhere, but it spreads quickliest on Twitter.

9. Fill out your profile. I see way too many incomplete profiles on Twitter. The profile is so minimal, yet so important. Use the URL field to link to another of your sites (a blog, another social media profile, &c.) or a webpage of interest to your niche. Use up all or nearly all the space allotted for a bio,  making sure to include the obvious key words that relevant people would search for. Upload a pleasant background photo and change the skin colors to complement it. Finally, don’t forget to upload an interesting picture. It appears in each of your followers’ streams each time you tweet!

Tricking out your profile has the beneficial side-effect of convincing incidental passers-by that you are serious about your e-home on Twitter.

10. Mention Twitter elsewhere. As you go forth and prosper on the interblags, link to your Twitter profile. If no one knows you exist, how can they find you? Here are a few places to advertise your Twitter profile (as innocuously as possible, of course!):

• Your Google profile.
• The “Your URL” box in replies on blogs and fora. (Bonus: fill in a link shortened from tr.im and get detailed analytics to see how many hits to your profile your post generated!) As always, avoid spamming popular threads. The more thoughtful your responses and questions, the more likely the exposure will translate into clicks.
• Email signatures.
• Other social media profiles. If you don’t have any other social media profiles, create them. It doesn’t take long. Even if you don’t plan to actively use these extra profiles, it’s good to reserve your brand or your name on each of the popular services and fill in a bio including your personal or business keywords; at the very least, it’s one more page that Google will archive.

(1) Cyclicity

I see the Middle Ages, modernity, and postmodernity (as concepts, over and above the time periods they only half describe) as peaks and troughs on an inescapable macrohistorical cycle. Just as modernity claimed its intellectual space by means of a return to the authority of the ancients, postmodernity mocks the monuments of modernity in medieval fashion—viz., by setting up a strict religion (in the case of postmodernity, this would have to be the Church of Irony) and issuing accusations of heresy and sacrilege. There are a wonderload of other similarities between the two periods, and I’m sure I’ll mention them throughout my tweeting and wordpressidigitating.

When you start to view macrohistory in terms of cyclicity, and not in terms of progress (and I am willing to admit here that this idea itself is unmodern), you start to search for atemporal terminology to describe the different general historical states. It is in this sense that, taken together, postmodernity and the Middle Ages constitute unmodernity.

(2) The human

One of the chief sites of conflict between modernity and unmodernity is the human body, and it is here that the example of the internet is of great use to the intellectual historian. The technological cataclysm that is the Web has fundamentally destabilized the modern conception of the human as a singular, single-minded, soul-cum-machine uniquely endowed with language and the privileges attending that gift. On the internet, humanity acts a lot more like it did in the Middle Ages: as a crowd.

(3) Response

Of course, all of this (re)emergence is a matter of public record. What really counts in a historical sense is our reaction to it. It is extremely easy for most people to fear postmodernity—the super-popular social networking site Facebook, for instance, is dedicated to protecting its users from some of the more dangerous (and liberating!) aspects of e-humanity.* Yet, as the postmodern theorist Gilles Deleuze writes:

It’s not easy to see things in the middle, rather than looking down on them from above or up at them from below, or from left to right or right to left: try it, you’ll see that everything changes. – Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

[as epigraphified at In the Middle]

So it is useful to think of the trends I am identifying not merely in terms of new information, new technology, and new social structures (although they have to do with all of these), but also in terms of a great ideological shift, a kind of opening of the collective mind. In the end, the great battles waged periodically over contested ideas like authorship, biographical authenticity, public/private identities, and the mind hinge on one most important question: Who are you trying to save?

*Where I see Facebook as a modern institution, Twitter, with its fractured discourse, obscure archival protocol, propensity for indication and gloss, and emphasis on avatars and brands, would most certainly qualify as a medieval interface.