On Performing Invisibility: the Heart of Twitter Community at Ashoka

Micro-blogging on platforms like Twitter (Now ‘X’) is often anonymised. You go by a nickname, and never include a picture or your government name. The algorithm finds your ‘community’ based on what you talk about on a public timeline with others, which mostly centers around your life. Real-world acquaintance is optional and privately sought out. These conversations are confessional, offer specific anecdotes, and often lead to intimacy (or parasociality) between individuals remarkable for their entirely virtual nature – but what happens when microblogging culture clashes with the proximity of a gated campus residence?

The nomenclature ‘ashokatwt’ came from a Twitter List (A Twitter List is a curated group of Twitter accounts, created by a user to organize, follow, or highlight posts from selected accounts separately from the main timeline; accounts can see when they have been added to a list. )  of accounts user big chungus/Vikram Tapadia (UG’24) published in 2022. If you were notified, you could be: a fan account occasionally celebrating the dining menu, an ‘official’ club/society account that ‘breaks character,’ or an account created specifically for ‘ashokatwt.’ The latter's aliases usually reference campus life (users adopt names like 'paid shuttle' and 'roti boti truther') and they come out at the time of public debates and popular events on campus. Notwithstanding the flavour of anonymity, if someone saw you make a campus reference, you were in. However, as a recurring  ‘username/FirstName SecondName’ format I use would suggest, anonymity here is imperfect – and this is by design.

Harsh*, an alum turned Teaching Fellow, describes his own negotiations with anonymity: faced with professional constraints, he deleted past tweets about his student experience. On whether his efforts feel successful, he admits, “Not really, anyone here could find out who I was if they really tried, based on what I say, and this goes for all of us on the website, although (…) it is a spectrum, the effort [taken to figure out their real life identities].”In the context of shared classes, parties, hallways, and bathrooms, where online agreement, dissent, and honesty create their own intimacy, Twitter at Ashoka raises suspicions not of who someone is, but of which one among them they are.

Suspicion and recognition in these moments undergird humour and gossip, belonging and solidarity, and hence intimacy: all that defines an experience on ashokatwt. Subtweeting, the practice of talking about someone without tagging or naming them, relies on you knowing. Ashokans also live-tweet, sometimes significant events like protests, elections and negotiations. Entering a room of hundreds-people you might not know intimately but still feel connected to through ongoing digital exchanges-creates visibility within invisibility. Complete anonymity then, is not only impossible but opposes much of what makes ashokatwt compelling. At the same time, removing all discretion can be risky. One student faced disciplinary action after tweeting criticism of a thesis advisor, resulting in a public apology on an account usually reserved for casual commentary. Similarly, Teertha* (UG’24) revealed that the administration revoked her application for a position after discovering a tweet she posted that did not align with their view of professional conduct.

Collage of Ashoka Twitter| Source: Uditi Mahindra

This intimacy is not enabled by perfect anonymity or lack thereof, but its very performativity. When asked whether her involvement with ashokatwt was anonymous, yearnalist/Ayushi Roy (UG2028) wonders: “No, I mean I don’t know. There are no details on my profile, but I refer to my name, like, all the time.” What does it mean to omit your name but still reference it? “When I am having a breakdown about something and it is too embarrassing to go to my friends, Twitter is like, there,” responds Kirti* when I ask her what keeps her on the platform. I then ask her if her friends are on her account. “Yes, but it's not like my roommate is going to quote tweet me.” Nayana Vaccharajani (UG’27), reflecting on the community, adds, “There is definitely a thrill of trying to figure out and being figured out.” Kirti’s friends recognising her on the timeline but pretending not to (and potentially asking her how she is in a separate conversation) is where the safety of her vulnerability lies. 

One person’s vulnerability can easily become another person’s exposure – or even perceived defamation. On a tightly knit campus like Ashoka, the characters in someone’s story are rarely abstract: they are classmates, clubmates, or friends who can be immediately recognized by context. Anonymous Mary might vent about a frustrating group member, but anyone paying attention would see her collaborating with a real person in the library. In this sense, the performance of invisibility: the careful curation of what is visible and to whom, is constantly tested. When anecdotes, complaints, or confessions intersect with recognizable others, anonymity becomes porous, and the stakes of disclosure rise sharply: what begins as a personal release can quickly ripple into public scrutiny for those implicated.

The anonymity also leverages a claim to invisibility, which can hold up to scrutiny. Maryam Andeleeb (UG28) reflects on “getting cancelled for being annoying” – when she faced online ridicule from seniors on ashokatwt for talking too much about the university: “I just use my Twitter to tweet into the void, and it was very funny to see people have these really strong reactions to them, like, it was kind of ridiculous.” It is ridiculous. But will there ever be a “void,” so long as mundane details about lunch, courses taken and town halls attended remain collectively accessible? A question that follows is: to what point in time?

Users get discovered every day, through confessions or cues. They switch names. I still find new information on these users after three years of being active. My partner and I ‘met’ on Ashoka Twitter. I had a hunch about who he was, what class we shared, but the doubt was part of the draw – we hinted and baited and discussed subjects without first names. We met, but without the compulsion from an in-person meeting, or its impossibility of a strictly anonymous one. Vaccharajani's phrasing –“trying to figure out and being figured out” – shows that it is precisely the lack of finality to both anonymity and revelation that generates the thrill. Like I suggested before, anonymity can neither be watertight or unattempted at all. For ashokatwt to exist in its current state, anonymity must be staged, and then fail.

This performance is quite like Ashoka itself. The university is liberal but not quite, close-knit but not quite, radical but not quite. Ashokatwt, like Ashoka, performs both: the agility, ingenuity, and care with which its community comes together & the precarity, the unspoken hierarchies, and the constant self-censor in spaces that feel both open and surveilled. Before subtweeting, there was overhearing your name at the tiny dining hall. Before #ProtectOurProfs, there were atrium sit-ins. Before all-visible public twitter breakdowns, there were drunk couples-quarrels at the tapri. In fact, the clashes are not even as intriguing to me as they were at the beginning of this article – they are an emergent form. Before Ashoka Twitter, there was Ashoka. By performing invisibility, Ashokans show the art of being present without fully being seen. In that tension I see both the charm and the challenge of life at Ashoka. 

(Edited by Giya Sood, Teista Dwivedi and Maya Ribeiro.)