Sphinx

One of the interesting side-effects of spending a reasonable amount of time on Twitter is the sense it gives you of the rhythms of global activity. Of course one gets an inkling of this from the way that the internet gets unmistakably slower from mid-afternoon in the UK, when the bulk of the US East Coast has woken up, and almost unusable by the time California logs on, but it’s far more noticeable when you follow a decent number of people and can get a sense of the timing of their bursts of activity. I’m sure there must be exciting ways of rendering my Twitter feed in graphical form (albeit well beyond my technical capabilities), so I could see shifting colours and patterns as the twittering line follows the dawn westwards, with new voices waking up and then fading away fourteen hours or so later – until the dead hours, around 5 am, when most of the US people I follow have gone to bed and the Europeans haven’t got started yet. Which is really a sign that I need to start following more people in Australasia and Asia, to keep the feed ticking over and give me something to read once I’ve finished catching up on the Yanks – any recommendations?

Of course, the dead hours are not wholly dead in the UK; they’re roamed by those whom I decided some time around 6.30 this morning, two hours after giving up on trying to sleep, to name the insomniacademics (I can’t imagine that this is an original coining – very unlikely that I’m going to come up with anything original in those circumstances – but I don’t actually recall seeing it before). There is probably some proper research on this, but intuitively it feels likely that academics are especially prone to insomnia: a profession which spends so much time locked in its own head, so to speak, depending on concentrated thought and obsessive self-consciousness, is always going to find it difficult to switch off at the end of the day and/or stop the brain kicking in the moment that they become even half awake, whatever hour it is (I used to be in the first category and am now firmly in the second, which may be a result of age). I wonder whether it’s worse for humanities and social science academics, and whether natural scientists, so apparently sensible and non-neurotic in other respects, are also better at compartmentalising work and home activities and so sleep better as a result. If there isn’t research on this there ought to be; for goodness’ sake, respectable newspapers are publishing inane articles about academic dress sense, and this is far more relevant to our ability to do our jobs and produce more or less coherent sentences when facing a class after a succession of disturbed nights…

Anyway, during the time I’ve been on Twitter I’ve noticed a few names that are likely to show up now and again when I’m flicking through Twitter at 4 am while waiting for the kettle to boil so I can get on with some work, and presumably certain people have noticed that I sometimes suffer from the same affliction as they do. I do actually work quite well first thing in the morning, but at 5.30 rather than much earlier, and lack of sleep can be as debilitating as physical illness – and perhaps more distressing, for people whose work and indeed identity depends heavily on being mentally alert; so, it’s a little bit of a comfort to know that there are a few other people out there in the dark who understand (unlike the cats, who are out there in the dark as well but whose view of the matter is that I’m simply a sucker whom it’s easy to wake up to get the food bowl filled). What we need is a more reliable method of working out who might be awake at ungodly o’clock; so, as a tentative proposition, let’s try disseminating the use of #insomniacademics as the hashtag for the first tweet of the early morning, so anyone else can just search for that and see if there are people they could follow for a bit of conversational relief first thing. Or, as I said earlier, I just need to develop more of an interest in what’s going on in India and Iran…