REFERENTE CONCEPTUAL

As Bloch (2012, 127) writes, “Academia is an organization that generates strong feel- ings of shame, bitterness, and anger,” but the display of anger within academia is relatively taboo or, as Bloch suggests, a “breach of feeling rules.” Despite the preva- lence of negative emotions in academic work, the narrative of the university as a space of rational and objective pursuit of knowledge structures those “feeling rules.” However, as we can see from the discussion of Twitter, online platforms can be marked and defined by a different set of rules and norms. Twitter, in particular, is a space where not only do professional and personal roles and identities blur but where the platform encourages and rewards personal, informal, and emotional con- tributions and interactions. As academics come to work in and through the platform, professional “feeling rules” are being redefined in relation to the platform’s affordanc- es.

While Twitter can facilitate long-term, sustained relationships and ongoing debates and discussions, the platform is designed for short (140 characters) bursts of com- munication and for instantaneous and rapid response from both “followers” and those outside one’s “follower” network. Communication on Twitter can also move very quickly, as a single tweet can not only be responded to but also “favorited” and/or “retweeted,” or shared by others, into their timeline. The brevity, informality, speed, and reach of discussions can make Twitter an interesting, exciting, and diverse space. However, it can also be a recipe for almost immediate (and public) miscom- munication, with the speed of the platform potentially collapsing any chance for clari-

fication, dialogue, or debate. The limitations and immediacy of the platform can sty- mie what Bady (2015) has called “generous readers” and Twitter conversations can easily spiral into large-scale “crises” of communication, without much hope of recu- peration of mutual ground among participants.

Furthermore, Twitter has gained a reputation for being particularly “toxic” (Rosen- baum 2016; Carrigan 2017). The platform has given safe haven to trolls, abusers, and white supremacists. For example, the platform now operates as a megaphone for the current U.S. president, Donald Trump, who has used it to berate fellow politi- cians and target private citizens of the United States (Paquette 2016). The language of “toxicity” has also been taken up to castigate women of colour online. Here de- bates about the “righteousness of other feminists” (Goldberg 2014) have blurred in larger condemnations about the ways in which diverse groups of activists have used Twitter as a platform to debate, organize, or theorize. We suggest that while Twitter as a platform has several design issues that can and do facilitate abuse, the lan- guage of “toxicity” can mask a racialized critique of the diversity of the platform.

But Twitter also provides a space for academics to channel that anger towards finding strength in community. For example, when writing about race and tenure in the academy, Matthew notes that, “when faculty of color rightly fear that their experi- ence with institutional racism is singular rather than part of a broader pattern, social media provide a space to find affirmation and solidarity” (2016, 242). So, despite its pitfalls, a key strength of “academic Twitter” is its diversity, its plurality of voices across academic hierarchies, and its ability to bring to light otherwise untenable con- versations, particularly about race, gender, discrimination and labour issues in the university. “Academic Twitter” forms, in many ways, a backchannel to academic con- versations that are not often welcomed or given a home in the brick-and-mortar uni- versity.

Given the platform’s affordances and the ways in which academics are taking to Twitter, it is reasonable to expect that anger will emerge in and through interactions. As Stewart (2016, 78) suggests, Twitter is increasingly being used as a “tactical plat- form”: individuals and groups take advantage of the reach of the platform, particularly through the use of hashtags, “which enable widely-distributed individuals to organize and galvanize around issues of common interest, political advocacy, or defense of what may be culturally perceived as threatened territory.” Stewart goes on to suggest that a form of “call-out culture” has also grown up alongside of this tactical use of the platform. “Calling-out” refers to the process by which tweets are shared and retweet- ed on a mass scale, specifically to draw negative attention to those tweets. Stewart (2016, 82) writes: “The rise of call-out culture thrusts academic Twitter into the messy business of being truly open to multiple publics at once, and forces scholars to navi- gate the cognitive dissonance between orality-based expectations of sociality and print-based interpretations of speech.” Conversely, calling-out can also draw atten- tion to important social justice issues and to amplify the voices of marginalized or vulnerable populations.

However, not all anger engendered by Twitter takes the same trajectories, and be- low we examine two different cases of where anger and other negative emotions have erupted on Twitter, to examine how these emotions function and to explore their social effects. As the sociologist Mary Holmes (2004) has shown in her work on an- ger and political life, anger plays a complex role in the unfolding of sociopolitical life, both motivating activity and fuelling conflict. In the case of Twitter, we also see that negative emotions play a vital, often fundamental, role in determining how ongoing

events in higher education are discussed, engaged, and experienced at both a per- sonal and institutional level.