Learning About Colonialism by Scrolling?

Abstract

It is here argued that lifewide learning possibilities may also be viewed in relation to social media, not least the plat-form Twitter, recently rebranded as X, and the Twitter/X thread; a number of tweets threaded together to form a longer text which is then communicated to, often, a large number of people. Twitter threads may be seen as a lifewide textual offer containing cosmopolitan potentiality, meaning here the potential for a transformation in per-spective due to contact with others on global issues, as envisioned by Delanty (2008). It is also argued that the Twitter/X thread functions as a type of social media genre, and three specific types of thread are here analyzed: 1) a collectively created type of thread which looks for contributions from numerous followers on Twitter/X, creating a multi-agent text; 2) an individually-created, 'closed' and usually numbered thread; and 3) an individually-created and open and/or open to collectivization thread, to which other tweets may be added at any time. Twitter threads from the curated Indigenous Australian account @IndigenousX, the British-Irish academic Katy Hayward and Irish historian Liam Hogan are analyzed as lifewide textual offers containing cosmopolitan potentiality. The global issue at the centre of all three threads - and accounts - are the contemporary consequences of European colonialism.