I came across Mike Caulfield’s internet presence during an attempt to find alternative means for creating a wiki through the makeshift use of a free web application and was directed to his blog post: Building a Pseudo-Wiki on Tumblr. The blog revealed that Caulfield works in educational technology, and I navigated to his ‘About’ page to find a link to his active Twitter account. His Twitter handle is @holden, which based on Caulfield’s surname, I assume is a nod to the protagonist from J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in The Rye. He has just over 13,000 followers, which appears average when compared to other educators in his Twitter community. After exploring other Twitter identities, I kept coming back to Caulfield’s because it’s good: he is active, he is engaged, and even his non-academic tweets, retweets and banter can be tied back to who he is as an academic. Up until a couple weeks ago, Caulfield worked as the Director of Blended and Networked Learning at Washington State University (Caulfield, n.d.), and as documented by his Twitter feed, he has recently begun working at the University of Washington’s Centre for an Informed Public as a Research Scientist who will lead a “rapid-response research program identifying, tracking and analyzing how mis- and disinformation takes root and spreads online during elections and crisis events” (Center for an Informed Public).
In consideration of my pre-existing perception of what Twitter is, combined with the experience of lurking through the feeds of many education and technology-based theorists and academics, I have concluded that in addition to serving as a participatory social media platform, a users’ Twitter feed is a means to construct an aura of self. Through conversations, retweets, the sharing of articles and poignant reflections of news, shows, movies, books and other media, a user collects bits and pieces that form a nebulous, fluctuating, and evolving construction of the individual they want their followers to see them as.
Themes of media and information literacy, the identification of misinformation, and education technology represent most of Caulfield’s tweets/retweets, though mixed throughout are quips about a show he is watching, or comments on current events – this builds a persona that comes across as casually professional. His Twitter feed is largely reflective of his work-life, it is for sharing original academic content and for interacting with likeminded thinkers and colleagues. However, there is an authenticity to Caulfield’s content that is often lacking in similar feeds. It is common to see Twitter feeds that take on a capitalistic nature, essentially operating as tools of career advancement and self-promotion to share links to the user’s new article, new book, new award, new collaboration, new event – these feeds limit impulsive, informal, personal, quotidian, or original content and there is minimal presence of unplanned public conversations or interactions with others who are not already in their inner circle. It is this kind of content that makes a person interesting or worth following and allows them to demonstrate a seemingly authentic self. Caulfield manages to exhibit this sense of authenticity through his Twitter persona.
On October 6, 2021, Caulfield authored an 18-tweet-long thread in response to a video of a recent anti-mask/anti-vaccine protest where he identifies a deficiency in information literacy as heard through a specific protester who claims “that in the 1918 pandemic people didn’t die of flu, they died of pneumonia, and you can even look it up on the gov’t NIH website” (Caulfield, 2021).
View entire thread here.
Caulfield’s thread uses this current event as an example to employ his framework for identifying whether a source is factual. The framework was first created in 2017 and is called SIFT, each letter representing a “…short list of things to do when looking at a source…” (Caulfield, 2019). SIFT stands for “Stop…Investigate the Source…Find Better Coverage [and]… Trace claims, quotes, and media back to the original context” (Caulfield, 2019).
In the 18-tweet-long-thread, Caulfield re-mediates the original tweet by working through the SIFT framework to prove, with clear examples, that the protester’s claim is in fact misinformation. This informal and reactive method of applying his work publicly and in real time supports authenticity and brings a sense of immediacy to his Twitter-self. As Bolter and Grusin (2000) describe, “immediacy is transparency: the absence of mediation or representation. It is the notion that a medium could erase itself and leave the viewer in the presence of the objects represented, so that he could know the objects directly” (p. 71). When Twitter is used as Caulfield uses it, his audience is immersed in his activity, they are thinking about him and the ideas he shares – not about the social media platform. The immediacy afforded by Twitter when used in this way provides the kind of rich experience that is analogous to what one might glean at an in-person lecture or artist talk. Barthes (1977) uses the term “supplement” (as cited in Frank, 1995, p. 29) to describe the richness or in other words, the additional something that an in-person encounter provides, but that written text lacks (Frank, 1995, p. 29). Supplement is described by Goffman (1981) as having two essential aspects, “first is the access the speaker affords to the audience” (as cited in Frank, 1995, p. 29) and second is “ritual”, the “preferential contact with an entity held to be of value” (p. 29). Caulfield’s genuine representation of self, combined with his active and abundant theory-based content on his Twitter feed creates a perceived notion of accessibility and ritual, and the functionality of the platform itself, and Caulfield’s use of it, provides a reality where direct access is possible.
Alternatively, when Twitter is used solely for self-promotion, it is reminiscent of passing the excessive billboards driving down to Florida on the I-95, or in digital terms, serves as stand-in for a series of obtrusive web ads on a click-bait site. This kind of Twitter use brings about “the psychological sense of hypermediacy… the insistence that the experience of the medium is itself an experience of the real,” (Bolter & Grusin, 2000, p. 71) where the medium itself impedes the audience from connecting and engaging to the content it holds.
Twitter affords its users with a tool for the public display of ideas, the means to connect (both congruently and in opposition) with others that may have otherwise been inaccessible and extends open discourse amongst those within and potentially outside their community of practice. If used to share original content, personal meditations and genuine interaction, the authenticity of a Twitter feed will encourage collaboration amongst peers and create the potential to attract interest and interaction from people outside of the expected community. Hill (2017) suggests that “disrupting personal and professional boundaries, and engaging in autobiographical inquiry, opens a space from which to practice, often producing transformative pedagogical shifts” (p. 9). The disclosure of an authentic, informal self mirrors and supports the de-formalization of academia that Twitter promotes. The public nature of the medium allows educational theorists to associate their ideas directly to real-world occurrences and to formulate unexpected connections, which make their work accessible and of interest to those outside of the academic realm.
References
Bolter, J.D. & Grusin, R. (2000). Networks of Remediation. In Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press
Caulfield, M. [@holden]. (2021, October 6). About 10 seconds into this one of the people harrassing the parents says that in the 1918 pandemic people didn’t die of flu, they died of pneumonia, and you can even look it up on the gov’t NIH website. And it’s a good example of how the way we teach infolit does harm. [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/holden/status/1445856372613021699
Caulfield, M. (2019, June 19). SIFT (the four moves). Hapgood. https://hapgood.us/2019/06/19/sift-the-four-moves/
Caulfield, M. (n.d.). About. Hapgood. https://hapgood.us/about/
Center for an Informed Public. (2021, October 8). Mike Caulfield to join CIP as research scientist, lead rapid-response research program. Center for an informed public – university of Washington. https://www.cip.uw.edu/2021/10/08/mike-caulfield-cip-research-scientist-rapid-response/
Frank, A. W. (1995). Lecturing and transference: The undercover work of pedagogy. Pedagogy: The question of impersonation, 28-35.
Hill, C. M. (2017). More-than-reflective practice: Becoming a diffractive practitioner. Teacher Learning and Professional Development, 2(1).