Today is my 9th anniversary on Twitter. Back in 2009, when I first signed up, I was at the end of my Postdoc period in UK and heading back to Norway.
Joining Twitter has given me a huge international network in academic philosophy, as described in an earlier blog post. It is a wonderful mix of first year students and famous professors in the field, coming together to share ideas, engage in discussion and keep updated with news, jobs and events. But Twitter is also a really nice place to meet people who share one’s research interests, potential collaborators and make friends. If one is organising conferences or planning a research project, Twitter is a good place to start. It also seems the best place to find members of under-represented groups in the profession.
Since I’m on my way to a 2-day seminar at the Norwegian Medicines Agency, Legemiddelverket, with Elena Rocca, I only have time to mention one example of what Twitter can offer.
On the CauseHealth project, we have really enjoyed our Twitter network. This is where we met all the wonderful physios and osteos who were intrigued by our project slogan, N = 1, and also by Matt Low‘s use of our vector model of causation in the clinical encounter. After much attention on Twitter, we decided to organise a conference just for the physios and osteos. In the end, all the 100 spots were taken within 48 hours, probably all thanks to our tweeting organisor, Roger Kerry.
I got a Twitter list of 2600 tweeting academic philosophers, and TrueSciPhi got many lists. It should therefore be easy for anyone to just start following them and join in on our large, friendly and egalitarian world of philosophy.
Rani blogs about causation etc. 