“Everything has its testing point in the eye, and the eye is an organ that eventually involves the whole personality, and as much of the world as can be got into it.”
In the book-nerd circles where I hang out, the most famous Twitter-hater by far is Jonathan Franzen, who has accused the service of being “unspeakably dumb,” “a coercive development,” “the ultimate irresponsible medium,” and “everything I oppose.” I love Franzen’s work, but reading him on the topic of Twitter drives me bidirectionally bonkers. Direction one: His opinions are bad-tempered, incurious, oversimplified, recklessly arrived at (he has no idea how Twitter works), and, in many respects, flat wrong. Direction two: How can he be so petulant, so dogmatic, so uninformed, and — in the deepest ways, where it matters most — so disturbingly right? What Franzen is wrong about is what actually transpires on Twitter. It’s not unspeakably dumb; the problem, in fact, is that it’s sufficiently smart and interesting that spending massive amounts of time on it is totally possible and semi-defensible.
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Whatever else Twitter is, it’s a literary form, which goes some way toward explaining why I find it so seductive. A tweet is basically a genre in which you try to say an informative thing in an interesting way while abiding by its constraint (those famous 140 characters) and making use of its curious argot (@, RT, MT, HT). For people who love that kind of challenge — and it’s easy to see why writers might be overrepresented among them — Twitter has the same allure as gaming. It is, essentially, Sentences With Friends.
What I find about these forms of extreme structure is that you really have to find the story that can’t be told in any other way. If you’re just taking what can be told conventionally and just smushing it into one of these other forms, it seems kind of gimmicky.
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Part of following somebody who is interesting is just watching their storytelling unfold over time.
Neil deGrasse Tyson on the craft of the soundbite.
Pair with Several Short Sentences about Writing.
Susan Sontag would’ve been in Salinger’s camp, as she famously loathed aphorisms and proclaimed that “one can never be alone enough to write.”
Though Twitter is not exactly a new writing technology, it is a technology that is affecting a lot of writers. … I sometimes wonder how the great writers of the past would handle the Twitter predicament. Would they ignore it or engage and go down the rabbit hole? Who are the really unlikely tweeters from literary history? Would Henry James, whose baroque sentences could never have been slimmed down into a hundred and forty characters, have disdained Twitter?
Most great writers could, if they wanted to, be very good at Twitter, because it is a medium of words and also of form. Its built-in limitation corresponds to the sense of rhythm and proportion that writers apply to each line.
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Gertrude Stein, with her gnomish, arty, aphoristic tendencies, would seem to be ideal. “There is no there there” may be one of the great proto-tweets.
A wonderful meditation on Twitter and writing by Thomas Beller. Also see how constraints boost creativity.
Still, the slippery slope of aphorisms exposes the difference between good writing and talented writing. For, after all, Susan Sontag memorably observed that “aphoristic thinking is impatient thinking” and “to write aphorisms is to assume a mask.”
Eric Fischer is back with another remarkable locals vs. tourists visualization, this time exploring the languages of Twitter in major cities. Pictured here, New York City’s tourists converge on Times Square.
Fischer’s work appeared in MoMA’s fantastic Talk To Me: Design and the Communication Between People and Objects.
Tweets sent by the same person within a 4 hour time-window were used as samples of speed and direction. These samples were used to construct a vector field representing the average flow of people within the area. The vector field and total tweet density over the space were then used to simulate the movement of people. Particles, representing people, were released at locations where actual tweets were recorded and their subsequent movement was determined by the flow field. The particles start out blue and gradually change through purple to red over time so each trace shows the direction of movement. Locations where there is little movement will have blue dots or very short blue traces. Longer traces with more red show a greater speed at that point.
Movement in Manhattan based on tweets. Complement with some deliciously analog, subjective, hand-drawn maps of Manhattan.
The Guardian data team maps the Twitter languages of NYC – best thing since mapping the dogs of NYC.
This is an ocean of ephemera. A library of Babel. No one is under any illusions about the likely quality—seriousness, veracity, originality, wisdom—of any one tweet. The library will take the bad with the good: the rumors and lies, the prattle, puns, hoots, jeers, bluster, invective, bawdy probes, vile gossip, epigrams, anagrams, quips and jibes, hearsay and tittle-tattle, pleading, chicanery, jabbering, quibbling, block writing and ASCII art, self-promotion and humblebragging, grandiloquence and stultiloquence. New news every millisecond. A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances. Now comical then tragical matters.
Call it what you will, the Twitter corpus now forms a piece of “the creative record of America” and therefore falls squarely within the library’s mission, says Robert Dizard Jr., the Deputy Librarian of Congress. Historians treasure nineteenth-century diaries; why not twenty-first-century tweets? “I think the twitter archive has the potential to allow researchers or scholars to paint a picture of the past with more colors or a fuller brushstroke.”
Mapping New Year’s Resolutions based on tweets, color-coded for altruism vs. narcissism.
Compare and contrast with famous resolutions from Jonathan Swift, Marilyn Monroe, Susan Sontag, and Woody Guthrie.
Fantastic new episode of PBS Off Book exploring the impact of Twitter on journalism.
Previous episodes have covered typography, product design, art in the age of the internet, book art and papercraft, generative art, the explosion of animated GIFs, LEGO art, the art of film and TV title design, the culture of Reddit, technologies that allow us to see beyond the human eye, logo design, and the art of motion graphics and animation.