In January 2013, I was a postdoc, about 18 months through what would be a 36-month position with Environment (and Climate Change) Canada in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. It was the heady days of Stephen Harper’s premiership in Canada, noteworthy for his right-wing anti-evidence, death-by-a-thousand-cuts approach to public services, and the muzzling of government scientists (where to speak, sometimes even at a conference, was highly regulated from high up the civil service). The blogosphere was taking off in new and exciting ways, and being the only person in my lab group, I found it a bit isolating. I’d had a personal twitter account since 2009, so thought to make a professional one that was, at first, pseudonymous because I could then be a bit outspoken about federal science policy. And so my twitter handle, and this blog, “The Lab and Field” was born.
Back then, there was 140 characters, including links, usernames, and images. We had to manually shorten links with bit.ly, and you would retweet by copying/pasting and prefacing the tweet with “RT @username:”, with suitable abbreviations added to conform to the now shorter text length. Hearts were stars. There was no green circle, and few corporate entities were present. Heady days indeed.
We lobbied for the Experimental Lakes Area, the Polar Environmental and Atmospheric Research Lab, adequate funding to NSERC, SSHRC and CIHR, and bemoaned the job market, much of which I also documented here (just browse the archive, which now stretches back a decade!). During my masters, I was rather active on the PhD Comics forum (or phorum), a bulletin board-style community that I don’t think even exists now. A number of us made the shift to twitter at about the same time, and so some of the reverence and general ECR complaining (rightly so!) came with.
It was where I first really encountered other LGBTQ+ folks in STEM, and in ornithology(!), which also built the foundation for what would become LGBTQ+ STEM and the STEMinar. That was truly life-changing and wouldn’t have happened without twitter. It fostered collaborations, brought partners together for funding proposals, and resulted in at least one paper.
For me, I’d say my general enjoyment of twitter peaked in about 2018 or so. That’s not to say it was all good all the time, but that since then, it’s been in slow decline and I’d been disengaging more and more (even before I was locked out). The rise of TERFs and literal nazis, and the increasingly awful UK political discourse that dominated my timeline in the last few years, along with some increasingly tone-deaf posts from folks I respected were signalling the end, in hindsight.
I remember a conversation in about 2017 or 2018 with a PhD student friend of mine about twitter, and how disillusioned they were becoming with it, and worrying about unfollowing or blocking someone they found annoying but who had a Big Following in Science Twitter™. My advice was to curate a feed for themselves, and it’s probably the best advice even today. Mute, block, and unfollow to your heart’s delight. A general (and over-generalizing) observation was that anyone with more than about 15k followers was better muted than followed.
But like all text-based methods of communication (or indeed ANY method of communication), it’s imperfect and when things got heated, it’s easy to misinterpret intent or motive (or just assume for that matter). That ruined some relationships with folks that I respected and supported for years. I was certainly blocked and muted by more than a few folks, and it stings the first few times, especially when it seemingly comes out of the blue.
If we’ve followed each other, then I’m still about online (mastodon.social/@TheLabAndField) and easily google-able if you don’t want another social media platform.
Lament for the decline and likely demise of twitter. It was a force for good, but also for not-good. It changed the way we communicate, as people and as scientists. It brought us together, but increasingly drove us apart.
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This will auto-post to twitter, so if you came from there, a reminder that I’m locked out and unlikely to return so won’t see any comments unless I go looking for them intentionally (which I do not intend to do).
The Lab and Field 