This week, for purely academic reasons, I found myself searching Twitter for Post Modern thinker action. Here are the results:
Deleuze (#deleuze) has Twitter form. I met a few friendly Deleuzians out there. Nice people!
Zizek (#zizek) is also trending (at least for a philosopher). Zizek has the advantage of being alive and so is still generating fresh content (eg lectures and articles) that can be tweeted by Zizekians. Zizek also has a sense of humour - a very Twitter-friendly attribute, almost as useful, in fact, as being alive. (Philosophers are not known for giving away free downloads, so humour helps).
Lacan (#lacan) - complex, serious (and dead) - only yielded one interesting tweet from an initial search.
Foucault (#foucault), despite being perhaps the trendiest Post Structuralist ever, is also not really twitter-interesting - just a lot of garlicky Europeans not speaking English (geez!) and undergrads complaining about having to study him late at night - as in “Bad coffee and a stomach ache - how much more fragging Foucault do I have to read???” (Ok that was me - but there were others!).
In terms of media analyses, #mmo and #mmorpg tend not to turn up much on Twitter: gaming news and fan-related links overload the feed. Searching for #mmo also results in a lot of Japanese and Korean tweets (in Japanese and Korean).
It’s easy to find tweets on Post Modernism and easy to find tweets on MMOs. Its not so easy to find tweets on both. Most tweets dealing with Postmodern topics include links to more substantial texts - 140 characters is not a lot of room to discuss, say, Derrida. (My favourite super-short Derrida tweet, though, would be “What's the différance? #derrida”).
What indeed?
