top of page
Search
  • Writer's pictureAlexandra Sills

The Numbers Game

Updated: Nov 9, 2023

Recent Twitter events have made me feel uncomfortable. Watching conversations unfold online over the course of yesterday have left me feeling niggled. An event that I myself referred to as a mere kerfuffle nevertheless grew and morphed as we watched and has left a sour taste.


As I lay down to sleep I started to think about why a discussion that had nothing to do with me affected me so much, only to realise that this does affect a lot of us. Who gets to 'do' Classics?


The question of who gets to 'do' Classics is one that I already have wrestled with many times. We all know the barriers to this, we have this discussion many times without ever seeming to solve the problems we identify. A smaller history account made an On This Day tweet. A Big Account scholar was not happy about it, and let their thousands of followers know. I know absolutely nothing about the person who runs the small account accused of plagiarism, a quick look at the 'about' section of their linked blog suggests a person with a genuine interest in the ancient world and travelling to sites of interest. No mention of academic qualifications, but indications that careful study and research are the norm.


I get this, because once upon a million years ago I ran a twitter account that was bordering on 'history influencer' (ugh) level with a comparable follower count and sporadically wrote a blog that celebrated my deep love of visiting ancient sites and researching their histories to a deeper level than an info board or guidebook. I also used to post an awful lot of On This Day hashtags. On This Day posts can range from michelin starred meals of carefully curated threads complete with links, to simple and cheerful single tweets to be consumed as a Big Mac - quick and without a lot of thought. The latter don't take much effort - look up the date on Wikipedia and choose an anniversary - post the first factoid available on Google, maybe mention a relevant site that is open to the public. Consequently on famous dates there will be dozens on accounts marking anniversaries. Multiple tweeters from multiple backgrounds, with differing credentials and methodologies but the same love of sharing what we think is cool. Historians and nerds alike, tweeting from across the globe from multiple time zones.


For accounts with a broad following, most information given is to a wide audience of non-experts. Consequently the information chosen to share will be the 'basics.' #OTD is rarely the correct format for sharing niche facts, post-grad research or advanced thinking. To do the food analogy to death (because I am writing this before breakfast and am hungry) #OTD is and should be an amuse bouche of a tweet - aimed squarely at those who have no prior knowledge of the subject and those who know the basics. It should aim to tempt the reader in to further investigation, whether that be a wiki wormhole or maybe even buying a general history book. Most that all of us can hope for is that a few followers will pause, read and say "huh, cool" before scrolling on with their day. Few academic careers if any were launched off the back of an #OTD.


Because of this accepted use of the hashtag, deciding to question who exactly gets to post them or even policing what content gets to be included in them seems to be a slippery slope. And the more I thought about this, the more that numbers struck me as a very important aspect of this argument. I mentioned my previous twitter account - I had a large following in the days when history accounts having large followings meant a few thousand people each. Numbers were something that I paid attention to and I tailored my tweeting and content to maintaining and increasing numbers. With my new account I started afresh, and I have made a conscious effort to not look at my numbers at all. To tweet what I wanted to tweet and not care about how many listen or worry that I may lose a digit here and there. But I'm not naive enough to believe that numbers don't still matter.


We're all classicists, so I'll ask you to picture these numbers in a visual way that we can all immediately get. How many Pnyxs does your twitter following fill? Maybe, like me, your followers couldn't fill the Boule, let alone a bloody great big hillside. Perhaps you could fill the Pnyx many times over. My point is this - when anybody tweets they are standing on a digital bema and their Pnyx is either full to overflowing or scantily populated. If there is one thing every ancient history undergrad knows, it's that Athenians had to carefully consider what they said on that bema, why they were saying it and how to say it to best effect.


Accounts with tens of thousands of followers have perhaps to take this into consideration far more than minnows such as me. That's unfortunate, but twitter is public speaking on a global scale and the larger your following, the larger your clout. We all know this to be true! We have all seen certain people with a large following use this to their advantage, knowingly or not.


Feeling sad? Tweet about it for instant comfort from tens/hundreds/thousands of kindly strangers, all keen to get the attention of a blue tick holder or semi-public figure. Feeling attacked? Tweet about it for instant validation from ten/hundreds/thousands of strangers who will be outraged on your behalf, offering to be that white knight and slay your dragons. Large follower numbers, blue ticks and/or celebrity within the field do attract followers from outside academia and they do have fanatics on the fringes. We've all seen sycophantic followers of big accounts pop up. I can only guess that for big account tweeters they are usually white noise amongst the many, many peers that are usually conversed with, but they are always in the background.


Sometimes these sycophants (with little better to do,) take up their digital pitchforks with no encouragement, sometimes they are subtly weaponised with intent. Big account tweeters should be aware of the potential of this army of fawning flatterers has on those that they are aimed at. It does not matter whether the big account tweeter intends to incite a pile on, we've been around the block enough times to know that it's an inevitability. That is where our Pnyxs come in. If one mounts their bema to accuse somebody of a real or imagined slight, numbers bloody well matter. If your Pnyx is overflowing, you can essentially set your assembly upon your target and if your target can't fill their Pnyx they will be overwhelmed. Again, just to stress, it DOES NOT MATTER if this was your intention or not. You will drown them out, even if you are wrong.


I will not claim that anyone had bad intentions this last weekend, but I will state again firmly that they were wrong to make this accusation and particularly in the manner in which they made it. The plagiarism claim was tenuous at best, especially taking the incredibly popular hashtag format into account. But instead of a a reply, or a DM, a digital bema was chosen and that has far reaching consequences. It sends a very clear message to a lot of people about who you consider worthy of 'doing' Classics. "Classics is for all, but not really."


And so people who have already been made to feel unwelcome to Classics, or unwanted, or inferior to those in academia start to feel uncomfortable. I've already spoken at length about how family wealth, class and state school education can shut down a life in Classics before it begins. If not for the magic of Birkbeck I'd still be a frustrated autodidact. Then we have the sexism and racism built into the very core of the field, and we have seen many a Classics tweeter fall at those hurdles. Next up, if you manage to get on a course and stay on it, is the job market that makes the Hunger Games look like a game of Snakes and Ladders. How many times have talented people I follow state that they know already that their Classics career is over as soon as they finish an MA? How many times have I seen talented graduates start blogs, podcasts and tumblrs because even after Classics has repeatedly told them it doesn't want them, they are unworthy... they still have to DO CLASSICS. They don't just want to, they NEED to. And if the internet is where they can do it, great. That they were not one of the lucky ones is not their fault and as we all know is less to do with talent and more with not having a winning academic Lotto ticket. Good research opportunities are already limited to who can access (and afford) higher education, good research material is already limited to those who can access (and afford) institutional affiliation. Many, and I include my future self in this, will be left with the crumbs from the academic table.


So when a university professor with a lovely job and wide audience starts laying claim to innocuous factoids on the hellscape that is Twitter, you'll forgive me if I get annoyed.



203 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Who Is(n't) Joining AncientBluesky?

This week I made the decision to mothball my main Twitter account, despite everything I owe to it. I may as well, having checked some statistics. I'm shown so few tweets now, unless I go through click

With an Eye to the Future

I've just started my MA dissertation. The time has come to say something original, and to stop merely relaying what others before me have said. Anyone who has studied the ancient Mediterranean at this

A Crash Course in Classics Bluesky

Twitter/X/Twix is now little more than a creaking wreck. You may notice that your engagement is down, you aren't seeing who you want to see, and Nazis with blue checks outnumber even the spammy ads. B

bottom of page