In a recent issue of English Studies, Edmund G.C. King takes a two-year-old incident on Twitter and uses it to develop a series of observations about literary value, taste, and cultural prestige in the age of social media. The incident was this: In August of 2020, the author Jess McHugh tweeted out a list of what she called the “Top 7 Warning Signs in a Man’s Bookshelf.” Entries included “too much Hemingway,” “any amount of Bukowski,” and “a dogeared copy of Infinite Jest.” Somewhat improbably, the tweet went viral; it was even covered by a handful of news organizations. I’d seen it myself at the time, though I’d entirely forgotten about it until I read King’s article.
King offers close readings of the hundreds of rebuttals, endorsements, and variations McHugh’s tweet inspired, and he explains the place of her list in several larger contexts: hook-up site “red flag” warnings, contests over gender and the literary canon, the recursive structure of “meme culture,” the strategies of social signaling used in internet dating. It’s a bravura example of how an apparently trivial piece of internet ephemera can, when approached with the right set of tools, open up a whole world, here the world of “book-talk” as it unfolds on social media.
That world is not, as King paints it, an altogether rosy one. Although social media offers moments of aesthetic play — King quotes the media-studies scholar Emma A. Jane on the “palimpsestic” nature of humorous or ironic meme manipulation — its most prominent tendency, as King describes it, is toward innovating “new forms of competitive behaviour among users,” competition not just between individuals but between user-clusters vying for quantifiable ascendency in a social structure stratified by numbers of followers and “likes.” (That stratification reflects only very roughly — and sometimes seems not to reflect at all — offline hierarchies of prestige, which is one reason that champions of Twitter see it as democratic or anti-elitist.) Social media’s “coercively affiliative logic” ultimately fragments users into groups of the like-minded according to a pattern of what the sociologist of social media Brady Robards, borrowing the concept from the French sociologist Michel Maffesoli, calls “neo-tribalism.”
The neo-tribe, as Robards explains, is by no means a pejorative designation. In Maffesoli’s original usage, it referred to impromptu associations marked “by fluidity, occasional gathering and dispersal.” Maffesoli thought such transient alliances were characteristic of postmodernity. Robards argues “that neo-tribal connections can also cohere over time, such that friendships and partnerships can spring forth from the kinds of fleeting connections” Maffesoli describes.
That’s one of the possibilities that Rafael Walker, in his contribution to a recent Review forum on academic Twitter, celebrates movingly. “The site,” he says, can “yield fulfilling, long-term connections, and it is worth asking whether avoiding the transient discord that one encounters on Twitter — discord scarcely less prevalent elsewhere in academic life — is worth depriving oneself of the possibility of lifelong friendships.”
But there are darker prospects, too. In their contribution to The SAGE Handbook of Social Media, Taina Bucher and Anne Helmond discuss changes Twitter made to the platform in 2016 in response to “declining user growth": The “heart” button replaced the previously less emotionally saturated “favorite” button (a star), and tweets began to appear not in reverse-chronological order but instead according to the dictates of what Bucher and Helmond call “the algorithmic timeline,” in which content assumed to be maximally interesting to any given user would occupy the top of the feed (“the best Tweets first,” as Twitter puts it). As King writes, these and other aspects of Twitter “help to generate patterns and practices of affiliation and repulsion among users.” This version of the neo-tribe, in which social media cultivates networks of affectively drenched in-groups and out-groups, is what Katherine C. Epstein, in her essay for our academic Twitter forum, described thus: “Picture a group of middle-schoolers pointing and laughing at a classmate, and you understand the basic dynamic.”
King’s tone is scrupulously neutral when it comes to evaluation. But toward the end of his essay, he quotes from the philosopher Justin E.H. Smith’s recent book, The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning (Princeton, 2022). Smith assumes no posture of neutrality; his vision is one of digitally determined dehumanization. “Those individuals will thrive most, or believe themselves to thrive most,” he writes, “in this new system who are able convincingly to present themselves not as subjects at all, but as attention-grabbing sets of data points.” Whether this is paranoia or prophecy remains to be seen.
Read King’s “Unpacking the ‘Red Flag’ Bookshelf: Negotiating Literary Value on Twitter” here, and Bucher and Helmond’s “The Affordances of Social Media Platforms” here. And for an early version of some of the arguments in The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, check out Justin E.H. Smith’s 2019 Review essay about Twitter, here.