I've had multiple convos over the last few days w/ early career people who want to use twitter, or social in general, for visibility and networking, but are wary of stepping wrong, and I'm going to tweet here things I've said:
They're worried about Twitter's reputation for pile-ons---you know, the "Twitter mob" and getting dragged and such.
It's true: Twitter's size and immediacy mean that bad---ie, benighted, idiotic, bigoted, ill-informed, overprivileged--- tweets can experience a lot of feedback very quickly.
But, in my experience, that kind of quantitatively striking feedback does not happen when you tweet about what you know. The trick is figuring out: what do you actually know well enough to tweet about?
Turns out, we all have lots of opinions that we think are knowledge, but are in fact not.
If you're part of a privileged group--you're white, you're able-bodied, you're straight, you're male, you're tenured or heck even tenure-track, etc--you may have a lot of those opinions-you've-given-to-believe-are-knowledge. They may even be hidden to you, seemingly universal.
You may not have ever been in, or put yourself in, a position to receive feedback about them before. And that is where Twitter will hurt: tweet about things you don't know, and you'll hear from people who *do* know.
But, tweet about your dissertation? your current lesson plans? an article you recently read and want to discuss? an upcoming conference or presentation on your topic? You know those things
Then, while you're #onhere, you can spend much more of your time listening---watching and hearing other conversations about topics you might be interested in, but don't know much about, learning things you would not otherwise learn
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