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At first glance, linking Henry James with social media may seem a misguided, if not wholly absurd, proposition. We might contend that James needs no digital facelift to maintain his literary freshness. We might fear that if we juxtapose his lapidary prose with twenty-first century tweets, texts, and status updates, such a comparison will surely suggest aesthetic judgments not flattering to smartphone habitués (while exposing us to eye-rolling ridicule in the classroom). When considering the linguistic complexities absent in the blunt simplicity of the average tweet or text message, we may suspect that the social media user, as James claims of Guy de Maupassant, "has no window looking in that direction," that social media discourages "that reflective part which governs conduct and produces character" (FN 205, 223). Yet it is difficult to justify a strict Jamesian binary between "fun" and "serious" communication, or a strict Jamesian association of brevity with superficiality and prolixity with complexity. 1 And if we value in James his linguistic microscopy-his patience in reconstructing infinitesimal connections among thought, conversation, and social relations-then such a project is hardly gratuitous. Indeed, identifying a common linguistic microscopy shared by James and by social media could invalidate ungenerous dismissals of social media by traditional humanists and of Henry James by resistant students. Such a move, I argue, constitutes the natural next stage of what David McWhirter has called "the postmodernization of Henry James" ("Modernist" 176) while trying to avoid the traps McWhirter identifies: sacrificing historical specificity and ignoring the critical heritage of James studies. To avoid such pitfalls while continuing to contribute to the ongoing project of considering James as a "precursor of our postmodern condition" (Rowe 195), I would like to shift emphasis from the postmodern condition to the conditions of postmodern conversation. Focusing on the many-layered processes of digital exchanges will provide a new answer for Jonathan Freedman's opening salvo in The Cambridge

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