Node Rot

This week I am of course going to talk about the thing that needs to be talked about, which is how Twitter space has changed and is collapsing around us. It is informed by this excellent thread by Dr. Johnathan Flowers

I have been thinking about node rot, and how when parts of a support system that we are a part of disappear, that the whole system itself is weakened. Like Dr. Flowers I am not seeing the same voices and the same kinds of content on my feed anymore. People who used to tweet a lot are now silent. In some ways it is interesting who you see disappear first. For example the UDL people have been mighty quiet lately. Which I mean is no surprise, when your whole shtick is white saviourism to increase ones h-index, when things get icky it is usually those people who will flee first because there are no h-indexes in that is there. Also quiet are the look at me I have great inclusive pedagogy and a book and I am on all the podcasts folk. Those were also the people to quickly leave because again, you can't sell non-inclusive, inclusive books, on a space that has become toxic to marketing.

For those of us who are still around, who have shown that this place is not a place we can readily abandon for a myriad of reasons: not having the spoons to set up a new account and community elsewhere; not knowing where the community we do count on will go and if things become fractured so will the support; not having the technological support go someplace else; how the someplace elses all seem to be just as problematically racist, ableist, and tone policey; this is really a time of flux and a time of trying to figure out what the new space without the people who were here before will feel like. 

I know for sure so many nodes that I have come to count on are not here anymore. I know some have gone to other platforms. Others just disappeared and left no trace of where they would be. I find myself thinking about how close to 12 years of my life and connections is now going be siloed when I already work in a space that is extremely siloed. This was the only place where all the parts of me could be. The accessible pedagogy part, the tactile and sensory scholar part, the queer part, the ed tech part, the Ruskinian part, the women's lit part, the recovering Victorianist part, the GenX former DJ part. No one place could all of those just be and interact holistically. These 0s and 1s on here that I curated and supported, became a virtual embodiment of me. It has forced me to realize how much I have put into one place in a really bad the personal is political move. Now I have this blog. This is my little real estate that I am going to cultivate, a place that pre-dated my twittering by 2 years. 

When nodes are lost it is also difficult to know just what we have lost. Like I cannot tell you exactly what kinds of links are missing from my feed, but I can tell you they are. In the moment we may think oh what happened to so and so, and go there to find the account is no longer active. Or maybe it will be years from now when you realize you would love to chat with this person, but you only knew them by their Twitter handle and you have no way of knowing how to search for them otherwise.  

I am not going anywhere. I will be here until they shut the lights or one day I wake up and the app just doesn't load anymore. I just wanted to give a bit of space to consider what is disappearing around us.