ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Twitter's collapse of oral and literate practices and expectations makes it a particularly fraught type of scholarly public, but one with a great deal to teach about the status quo of scholarship and where change may be desirable. The chapter deeply examines into the idea of academic Twitter as a collapsed public, framing Twitter as an intersection of oral and literate cultural traditions within the context of knowledge production and scholarship. Academia can be seen as an instantiation of what Ong calls 'high literacy', with its 'different contours from those of orally sustained thought'. The ways in which academic Twitter cultivates forms of expression and academic capital that differ from conventional institutional practices points out to everyone invested in higher education that many of the traditions and outlooks we may take for granted are not inherent to the pursuit of knowledge, but are products of print and its assumptions and limitations.
