To Tweet, or Not to Tweet?

Last spring I waded my way through the text-laden and theory-heavy course known as English 300, or Approaches to Literature. Throughout the class we learned the main literary criticism and theory necessary to succeed as an English major, and one of the ones that interested me the most was Reader-Response Criticism (called RRC from here on for brevity). For those of you who are unfamiliar with RRC, here is a detailed explanation and overview of the criticism and its history.

Earlier in the week, I raised the question in our participation forums about the interconnectedness of RRC and the use of hypertexts. As I've been working on annotated bibliographies and research papers for other classes, I can't help but wonder how different the experience would be if I were reading electronic editions of these scholarly articles with hypertext annotations. Landlow says this about the use of hypertext in scholarly works: "Although you cannot change my text, you can write a response and then link it to my document" (Landlow).

I would question whether or not this creates an entirely different type of RRC by incorporating the reader's experience with the collective audience's opinions in an interaction with the main text. As we progress farther into the digital age, I would argue that developing a system for incorporating scholarly electronic editions with hypertext into the traditional research and learning process is only beneficial. By allowing students to read and incorporate other perspectives they will be able to form more well-rounded opinions.

Over the last few years, the humanities world has seen several changes to accommodate the growing integration of electronic media into scholarly research. An example of this is the incorporation of Twitter and 'tweets' into MLA's citable resources. An article published in 2012 briefly discusses the benefits and drawbacks to this decision, but overall commends the MLA for considering Twitter as part of the scholarly discussion. In my opinion, the further we integrate electronic resources into our research, the more information we (as scholars) can incorporate and use to produce phenomenal papers and presentations.

While there are other obstacles standing in the way of a full-on electronic incorporation, such as equitable and unrestricted access to the Internet globally, I believe that classes like these are creating the building blocks for a successful argument for the integration of electronic media and tools into the classroom, academic sphere, and beyond.

Works Cited:

Byford, Sam. "Modern Language Association Standardizes Format for Citing Tweets." The Verge. N.p., 8 March 2012. Web. 17 September 2014.

Landlow, George P. "Reading and Writing in a Hypertext Environment." Reading and Writing in a Hypertext Environment. Johns Hopkins University Press, n.d. Web. 17 September 2014.