I’ve been doing a lot of muting on the Twitter this morning – over eighty separate accounts, all of which tweet out short extracts from that early P.G. Wodehouse story I’ve discussed before, as well as other stuff that I can’t be bothered to look up. For the most part, that’s all they do; whereas the accounts I muted back in the autumn generally sent out images or gifs as well as text, apparently advertising things like betting sites for the World Cup, the vast majority of these just individually meaningless fragments of text (the exceptions are a sub-group that include pictures of anime girls). (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’
The Bots Are Back In Town
Posted in Musings, tagged Thucydides, Twitter on March 24, 2023| Leave a Comment »
Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots
Posted in Musings, tagged education, P.G. Wodehouse, Thucydides, Twitter on November 18, 2022| 2 Comments »
Something even weirder than normal is happening on Thucydides Twitter. I hesitate to use the word ‘invasion’ because of its association with the UK government’s racist anti-migrant rhetoric, but certainly I feel like a scientist in the opening act of one of those movies, puzzled by the suddenly anomalous behaviour of the pond snails he’s been studying, not realising that this is just one small segment of a rapid montage, the dots that will not be joined by anyone except the viewer until Act Two… (more…)
Weaponising Thucydides
Posted in Musings, Research in Progress, tagged international relations, Melian Dialogue, Russia, Thucydides, Thucydides trap, Twitter, Ukraine, war on April 5, 2022| 2 Comments »
‘Doom-scrolling’ is, I imagine, a familiar thing, that many of us have been doing far too much of lately. You may not, however, have come across ‘professional doom-scrolling’, which unfortunately does not mean you get paid for it, but rather involves justification of the activity through some sort of “but I have to do this for work”, addressed to frustrated loved ones and even to ourselves, to explain how this is not simply a deeply unhealthy bit of obsessive behaviour. It’s relevant to this piece I’m working on; I need to cover related issues in class next week; there’s a developing methodological debate that connects to my area. This practice is quite distinct from what we might call ‘catastrophe dissemination’, the uncontrollable urge to link current events to one’s own research in order to write topical social media posts and would-be popular comment pieces, although the professional doom-scroller may indeed end up writing such pieces as a doubling-down on their original justification for spending a deeply problematic amount of time on the Twitter. (more…)
Doubling Down
Posted in Musings, tagged quotations, Thucydides, Twitter on July 7, 2020| 2 Comments »
As the old proverb (sometimes attributed to Solon) has it, gods, give me the confidence of a mediocre white man on the Internet. Am I being hasty and unfair, leaping to judgement on the basis of fleeting interactions with ‘The Mystic’ (brooding headshot with goatee, quote about chaos and perfection, cover image of some heavily tattooed wrestlers) or AwesomeDude (avatar of a dog, cover image of a Dilbert cartoon)?* Yes, quite possibly. But if they not only ascribe that wretched ‘The society that separates its scholars from its warriors…” quote to Thucydides, but firmly reject gentle correction from the Thucydides Bot, they’re gonna get judged… (more…)
Parlez-vous Thucydide?
Posted in Musings, tagged quotations, Thucydides, Twitter on December 12, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Sprechen Sie Thukydideisch? I don’t know why it hasn’t occurred to me before to check for Thucydides references in other languages on the Twitter – I did it back when I was playing around with Google ngrams – but it took an error this morning to push me in this direction, leaving off the ‘s’ at the end and suddenly finding a lot of French tweets. Nowhere near as many per day as you get in English, unsurprisingly, but a lot of references to la piège de Thucydide, a certain number of references to the Castoriadis book that I still need to get round to reading, and evidence that someone has gone to the trouble of translating “the society that separates its scholars from its warriors…” so that it can be misattributed in French as well. (more…)
More Than A Feeling
Posted in Research in Progress, tagged misinformation, quotations, Thucydides, Twitter on February 26, 2019| 6 Comments »
Last week I was at a fantastic conference in Newcastle on Authority and Contemporary Narratives about the Classics (details here), discussing different aspects of the image and appropriation of the ancient world in the public sphere; Rebecca Futo Kennedy gave the full version of the discussion of the history and problematic politics of ‘Western Civilization’ that she’s been trailing on the Twitter (@kataplexis if you don’t already follow her), and there were fascinating papers on topics like postgraduate blogging, the intersection of ideas on Roman imperialism and Realist international relations theory, concepts of myth in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, and whether Livy was a good Wikpedian. As ever, the main problem was that we needed much more time for discussion – well, that, and the fact that I could carry only so many bottles of local craft beer home with me. (more…)
Sphinx 