Kenley, I’m following you now on Twitter…by the way…

Dave, I’m going to think a bit more about your comments, great food for thought. I do, though, like the idea of looking for strategies and subversions around this questions of publicity and commodification. Stross’s work was already recommended to me by a fellow Twitter friend…darn thesis leaves me no time to read new stuff! One day…

I do agree my move to private tweets was knee-jerk, and I’ve been thinking “was it the right thing to do?” since I did it.

For the time being, I am happy to remain public and see where it takes me. Good food for thought.

I want to start by clarifying the issue of “affective currency” here. I think this is something people often talk about, but it is not really where I would want to stake my ground (granted in my twitter response I see how this can be taken as what I was representing) instead I want to argue for something a bit different.

I think one of the “tricks” of capitalism (to be sure I wanted link this solely to capitalist economies, but I’ll just shortcut here) and neo-liberalism is to commodify ideas and thoughts, not just goods. So that in our economy of exchange we treat ideas as if individuals own them and as if they were individually produced, when in fact this is certainly not descriptive of this current moment of collaboration, but indeed was never the case—ideas and thoughts have always been the collective.

This was one of the attractions of twitter, especially early on. As you point out here it was relatively small, it was easy for me to find a group of people who were sharing ideas (both mundane and thought provoking). But, as with any space (the Facebook example here is telling), the commodification and corporatization of said space grows increasingly troublesome.

But, if we close of the publicness of twitter in response to the commodification of the space, I think on one level we retreat from the very thing that makes twitter valuable. Take for instance the public timeline. There are many times where I have checked out the timeline just to see what people are talking about, especially during large public/national/international events, or as you point out during “political” events. What makes twitter really interesting is the way it becomes the pseudo public sphere you close with. Now it is not ideal. Habermas probably wouldn’t like it very much, as the conversations are short (140 characters) and don’t really look like the Salon conversations. But I have learned a lot from the publicness of people’s tweets. Take for example lonesoph1st who I found because she was twittering during the Texas caucus (an interesting/disturbing tweet about people in her location insisting Obama was a Muslim). If her tweets had not been public, I would have never started following her. (She has enough similar interests to mine that what she says is not just “noise,” but enough difference that it expands my perspective.) I have “met” many people this way, and have come to enjoy their tweets, opening up perspectives and thoughts I would have never encountered. Going private as a response to the commodification of the space, cuts off this possibility, in effect going private decreases the value of twitter, abandoning the space. Is this the right move? Perhaps, perhaps the point is to be always ahead of the commodification, jump ship soon as the marketers and branders move in. Maybe not though . . . In this sense I think I have this unjustified utopic hope represented by Manfred Macx in Storss’s Accelerando, if we treat things as if they are not commodities they just might stop being commodities. Whereas, if we start insisting on a “privateness” and ownership of ideas we have already given over too much ground to neo-liberalism.

Now, granted I am in a particularly privileged position, someone already pays me to think and produce, I don’t need a revenue stream from my work in the same way that an artist does. Giving away my thoughts and ideas is not going to lose me money, or really get anyone else money, but it does increase the value of the conversation.

As an academic I am basically paid by the public (granted tuition pays most of my salary, but this would not be possible with out government tax dollars subsidizing the system) to produce and exchange ideas. I think it is important for academics to think about that production taking place beyond the classroom, and beyond the students one is faced with everyday.

Okay this is getting to long now, especially for a comment, so I leave this for now, but to be continued . . .