As reported in an intriguing article in Inside Higher Ed, the practices and implications of "live-tweeting" during conference proceedings have become subject for a scholarly debate: #Twittergate. Naturally enough, a good deal of the debate has taken place via Twitter, and some of it is captured at this Storified aggregation:

#Twittergate: what are the ethics of live-tweeting at conferences?

This is an important debate in that it queries the navigation of private and public spaces, the relationship between liveness and recording, and the development of a netiquette adequate to the conditions and imperatives of increasingly neoliberal university culture. Last week I sent a couple tweets about a talk George Elliot Clarke was giving, but found myself holding off sharing some of the best statements, thinking they'd be better appreciated in context, in print, and thus also formalized and recognized as Clarke's own intellectual property.

On the other hand, the extent of quotation Twitter affords falls far short of what fair dealing readily allows - and in addition, 140 characters can't credibly "give away" the substance of even a working thesis. Twitter, I find, is a very good medium for translating a scholarly argument into a plain-spoken talking point, but what's lost in that translation process is always nuance, subtlety, and context.

On balance, I still think Twitter an important tool for scholars to engage the public with research - but netiquette is always in style too.#Twittergate has raised some valuable questions about tweeting at conferences, and chief among them might be that which asks whether this practice is really about communicating publicly valuable research results, or rather about the tweeting scholar's own individual and aspirational "branding" in a research culture increasingly colonized by neoliberal ideology and its instrumentalities. In the process of raising questions like this, #Twittergate is also floating and workshopping some netiquette norms, like the suggestion that a presenter should indicate at the outset whether live-tweeting is acceptable, and the suggestion that maybe panelists up at the front table but not presenting shouldn't themselves be live-tweeting.