It Takes Two to Tweet: Interpretation as a Shared Responsibility

Remember back in the 90s when people were figuring out email etiquette? (I know, some people are still working on this.) I remember lots of advice to take care in writing emails because emails don’t convey things like tone of voice or body language. Without such communication aids, the argument went, emails are easy to misinterpret. There’s only so much that emoticons and careful word choice can do to convey one’s affect, so some messages are better delivered in person or over the phone.

The more I think about this advice, the more it bothers me. It places the entire responsibility for avoiding miscommunication on the sender of the email, not the receiver. I get that if you’re the one sending an email, you should do what you can to make sure your message is received as it is intended. However, isn’t it reasonable to place some responsibility on the receiver to realize that his or her interpretation of an email might be incorrect? And to give the sender a little grace when reading an email?

Why am I mulling over email etiquette advice from the 90s? Because I think this issue of misinterpretation is even more relevant to Twitter than it is to email. If you thought communicating via email was challenging, try saying something with nuance and tact in 140 characters or less. You have all the constraints of email, with far less space to work around them. It’s incumbent for Twitter users to compose tweets that communicate effectively and minimize misinterpretations. And as with email, sometimes a particular message is best delivered using some other medium.

That said, I also think it’s important for those who read tweets to realize that tweets are necessarily elliptical and, yes, to give Twitter users a little grace. A tweet consists of the 140 characters that compose it, as well as a context and background that’s not explicit in those 140 characters. A tweet can be visible to the entire Web, but it might be written for an intended audience that brings a certain set of understandings and assumptions about the subject of the tweet and an existing relationship with the author of the tweet. Moreover, a tweet may look like a free-standing piece of writing, but to the author of the tweet, it’s part of an ongoing narrative she or he is constructing over time through dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of tweets.

A wise consumer of tweets knows all this and acknowledges that his or her interpretation of a given tweet might suffer for lack of context.

Here are a couple of tweets of mine that, according to one student who filled out my course evaluations, “completely insult and degrade the intelligence” of my students:

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/derekbruff/status/184379699475120128″]

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/derekbruff/status/188477698606235648″]

If you read these two tweets with a sneer in your voice and ignore evidence from prior tweets that I love teaching and rave about my students, then, yes, these two tweets can be interpreted to imply I think my students are dumb. But they weren’t intended that way, and if you read them that way, you’re not exercising sound Twitter literacy.

I’m not abdicating my responsibility for crafting my tweets with care here. Those two tweets are perhaps snarkier than most of my tweets. The former was tweeted after I realized that I would have a good bit more work to do on my students’ application projects because they didn’t follow directions and form teams of three. The latter was written after a long grading sessions looking at project proposals and seeing almost no students following APA guidelines. In both cases I was frustrated and, as I said, perhaps snarkier than I needed to be. But to judge my character on these 200-something characters without looking at them in the context of my other tweets and online writing? That’s unfair.

The anonymous student who disliked those two tweets really took issue with this series of tweets, all concerning a set of “Why Choose Vanderbilt” blog posts by students writing for the admissions office:

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/derekbruff/status/186450369587585026″]

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/derekbruff/status/186450785184395264″]

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/derekbruff/status/186451063023468545″]

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/derekbruff/status/186451645213839361″]

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/derekbruff/status/186451871773368321″]

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/derekbruff/status/186452221733519361″]

Here’s what my student said about these tweets:

“Dr. Bruff completely tears apart several Vanderbilt undergraduate student blogs about the reasons they chose Vanderbilt. Bruff focuses on the fact that students did not mention academics in their blogs, which should be obvious to any prospective student that is looking at Vanderbilt anyway and wants to know what distinguishes a wonderful academic institution like Vanderbilt from another wonderful academic institution like Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. He publicly humiliated these individual, non-anonymous students in front of his entire Twitter audience.”

Perhaps this student took Vanderbilt’s sterling academics as a given during his or her college search, but is that necessarily true of all prospective students? Might the relatively scarce mentions of academics in these blog posts send a message to some prospective students? Or to others who read these blog posts? I’m often struck by how graduating seniors at my university and elsewhere rave about how much they learned “outside the classroom” while in school. I’m not opposed to learning outside the classroom, but do these kinds of comments do a disservice to the learning that occurs in college classrooms? Is the value of classroom-based learning taken as a given by graduating students? Or do they highlight their out-of-class experiences because their in-class learning experiences were lacking? If academics are key to the mission of a university, why don’t graduating seniors rave about their courses? Why don’t admissions bloggers point to their coursework as reasons to select a college?

These are questions that are worth asking. They are questions that I implied, but did not state, in my series of tweets about those admissions blog posts. Sure, it’s hard to infer these questions from my tweets if you read my tweets as coming from someone with disdain for students. But if you read them in the context of my other tweets, this series of tweets becomes an expression of how much I value students and student learning. In that context, my hashtag-laden tweets surface, I think, some of these important questions about the centrality of the learning to the undergraduate experience.

My student critic goes on to write:

“This is something that is completely uncalled for from any professor, and it is absolutely not Dr. Bruff’s place to do this. He not only disgraces himself as a Vanderbilt professor, but he disgraces himself as the Director of the Center for Learning, an institution that is supposed to be dedicated to producing strong, positive teaching role models. Dr. Bruff and his attitude are simply anything but.”

(It’s the Center for Teaching, not the Center for Learning, but that’s a common mistake.)

This is one interpretation of my tweets. Another is that I used a bit of humor and the storytelling capacity of Twitter to point out a troubling inconsistency: That our rhetoric praises the value of teaching and learning, but when a group of students are asked by the admissions office to identify reasons prospective students should consider the university, relatively few of them elect to mention academics. I’m not savaging individual student bloggers, I’m wondering what conditions led these students to mentions things other than academic. I’m holding up a pattern that worries me and inviting others to consider this worrisome pattern with me. It is, I think, my place to do such things.

Yes, it’s critical that we watch what we tweet. But it takes two to communicate. It’s equally as critical that we read others’ tweets with care, paying attention to context and extending to each other a bit of goodwill.

What do you think? Is it time to modify that 90s email etiquette advice to ask those who read email (and tweets and blog posts and whatnot) to take some responsibility for successful communication?

Image: “It Was Him,” by me, Flickr (CC)

7 Responses to "It Takes Two to Tweet: Interpretation as a Shared Responsibility"

MJ says:

May 24, 2012 at 4:51 am

FWIW, I read them as self-questioning at the time. Although not obvious, there is an implied question mark in the #wheresthelearning tag. And you have written some very positive tweets about students.

With all written communication, not just tweets but email and letters, you have to be careful how you interpret it. Plenty of examples of how something nice can be accidentally read the wrong way. This is to be human.

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Robert Talbert (@RobertTalbert) says:

May 24, 2012 at 8:53 am

I’m unsure about this. On the one hand, yes, Twitter is a medium that excludes a lot of context, and so readers should put people’s tweets in perspective. On the other hand, perspective is exactly what so many university students lack. So as an academic myself, I have to go into the tweeting process with the understanding that if a student reads my tweet, if there is any negative misinterpretation (or under-interpretation) that can possibly be made, it may well happen, and this could go on to become some kind of mark on my record.

Is it fair? Is it good communication practice? No and no. But I’ve had enough run-ins with anonymous complainers myself, and the Deans who enable them, to set an ironclad policy for myself of making no public statements about students that could be interpreted as negative. This is hard and sometimes it makes me feel like I am being artificially happy about everything, but as a public academic, I just take it as part of the choices I make about what I publicize and what I don’t.

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Karl Schnapp says:

May 25, 2012 at 1:50 pm

That readers misinterpret tweets is hardly surprising, given the limitations Twittering imposes. Generally speaking, when we sense our communication needs clarification, we ADD more words, more examples, more explanations (a move that sometimes serves to decrease clarity). This suggests that Twitter is an inefficient medium for nuanced communication. Or whatever.

But what struck me about this posting was the tone. To me, it sounds defensive, like an effort to insulate yourself from student criticism. However, it’s entirely possible that I’m misapprehending your tone.

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Derek Bruff says:

May 25, 2012 at 6:18 pm

Thanks for the comment, Karl. If there’s a defensive tone to this post, it’s because I felt a bit attacked by this student. I don’t mind if students object to my choice of teaching methods or implementation of those methods, but I take it personally when they criticize my character, which is how I read this student’s comments. It’s understandable, as you note, that a student might misinterpret my tweets. What’s less understandable, at least to me, is the harshness of this student’s critique of my tweets on my course evaluations. Instead of acknowledging that he or she might have misinterpreted my tweets, assuming some level of good intentions on my part, and asking me (by Twitter or email or in person or on the course evaluation) for clarification, this student opted to lay into me through the mechanism of my institution’s course evaluation, a mechanism that doesn’t easily allow me to respond to the student’s concerns.

I’m open to student criticism, but I object to overly harsh student criticism that doesn’t invite conversation, when conversation would be much more useful for all involved. I’m aware that there’s a power imbalance in my classroom–that given my role as evaluator, some students will be hesitant to criticize me. But I think there are more productive ways for students to share their concerns safely than to frag me on my course evaluations.

The problematic nature of course evaluations, at least as they’re implemented as most colleges and universities, doesn’t help here, of course. This student wrote his or her comments with administrators in mind judging by the references to me in the third person. Was this student aware that I would read the evaluations, too? I mentioned that in class, but there’s no telling if this student heard or believed that message. If the student didn’t think I would read these comments, that changes the dynamic here a bit. I still think the comments were overly harsh, even as a private communication to my supervisors, but had the student known that I was going to read them, he or she might have toned down the rhetoric out of consideration.

Moreover, regardless of this student’s perception of audience, it’s a problem that evaluative feedback on my teaching meant for my supervisors is delivered using the same channel as formative feedback on my teaching meant for me. This means the course evaluations serve two sometimes very different purposes, and that makes for a bit of a mess at times. And, as I noted in the paragraph above, it’s unclear to me how students perceive the purposes and audiences of these evaluations.

Putting aside the example of my student’s course evaluation comments for a second, I’ll admit to a little defensiveness in the first half of my post. I’ve see too many news items about people (usually politicians, sometimes academics) who get into hot water over a single tweet (or Facebook post or blog comment or whatever). Sometimes the criticisms that these people receive are justified, but often those who throw stones (figuratively speaking) don’t make an attempt to understand the context in which the offending statement was made. That bothers me. It gives the impression that if you use new media, you need to watch what you say, without conveying the other half of the responsibility equation: When you read something on new media, you might have to work a little harder to interpret it. Without this corollary, there can be a chilling effect on discourse in new media, leading to smart and generous people (like Robert Talbert, who commented above) holding themselves back from engaging in certain conversations online. That’s a loss, I think.

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Karl Schnapp says:

May 26, 2012 at 8:18 am

Thanks for your thoughtful and extensive response, Derek.

Conventional wisdom says that course evaluations correlate with grades — students give good evaluations in courses where they think they will receive good final grades, and vice versa. Obviously, that’s not always the case: I’ve been ripped by students in a course section, some saying the class was too much work (and who, I ASSUME, did not not perform well), and others saying the class was not challenging (and who, I ASSUME, performed well).

The two issues — the anonymity of course evaluations AND the conflicting purposes of course evaluations — have always troubled me. Here in Massachusetts the statewide student testing program has a similar problem. The tests not only determine whether students will graduate, but also whether a school is performing AND whether individual teachers are performing.

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Laura says:

June 11, 2012 at 4:12 pm

I really like those admission tweets. When selecting my US grad school (I’m British) I was horrified by the number of colleges who would put a long list of ‘library facilities’ in their admission material, starting with computers, hang-out spaces, coffee bars, etc and only ending on the fact that there are- almost incidentally- x number of books available too!
One of the advantages of Twitter is that the brevity can quickly point out such absurdities and force us to deal with them. Keep tweeting I reckon. It’s refreshing.

Reply
Derek Bruff says:

June 12, 2012 at 4:58 pm

Thanks, Laura! I appreciate the encouragement.

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