Tweets Can Now Be Cited In Academic Papers. This Is Awesome.

Tweets can now be cited in academic papers. Many will recoil over this. I fucking love it.

io9:

Devotees of  arbitrary style guidelines, rejoice! According to  the Modern Language Association, there is now a designated format for citing a tweet in an academic paper:

Begin the entry in the works-cited list with the author’s real name and, in parentheses, user name, if both are known and they differ. If only the user name is known, give it alone.

Next provide the entire text of the tweet in quotation marks, without changing the capitalization. Conclude the entry with the date and time of the message and the medium of publication (Tweet).

So, for example: in the future, when humanity’s last epidemiologists are using tweets to model the spread of the zombie plague that laid waste to 99.9% of the world’s population, their citations will read as follows*:

Gonzalez, Robert (rtg0nzalez). “Can anyone recommend a good doctor for a bite wound? This thing is starting to look pretty gruUUBRAINS.” 3 June 2017, 6:17 p.m. Tweet.**

*Assuming, of course, that scientific journals of the future haven’t come up with Twitter-referencing rules for their own proprietary style guidelines, of which  there  are  many.

**Yes, the tweet would actually read “BRAINS.” Didn’t you know? In the future, your twitter account will be wired directly into your central nervous system, allowing you to update your feed with your thoughts and/or latent cannibalistic urges.

Listen. This is No Fucking Country for Old Men and Women. Either you ride the technological wave or you’re left as debris along the shores of our cultural consciousness. This is neat in the sense that it’s incorporating new technology into the discussion. Even if you hate Twitter (I don’t, condemn the usage not the medium I always say), the idea of citing it in MLA is pretty righteous. As an aside: I’m a literature graduate student, and I hate the arbitrariness of citing guidelines.