Literary Unleashed by Carole Flynn

TwiTTerature & Twediting is Anyone Safe: Ellison, Seuss, or Sedaris? If Oliver Twist were resurrected would he say, "Please Twitter, can I have some more words?"

I recently bumped into something valuable on Twitter.  Now, that may sound hypocritical coming from me, but hear me out.  I know I usually rail against the people who have followed me on Twitter (the onslaught of pornographers and investment scam artists), but Midge, thank you Midge, you most definitely broke that mold.  Midge's website: www.MidgeRaymond.com is a great resource for readers and writers.  She's recently written a post about the book TwiTTerature. 

Here's the plot: two college kids are retelling the classics of literature in Twitter format.  Unfortunately it's nonfiction.  I recommend her article "Twitterature: It's what's on the Syllabus." (Link: http://www.midgeraymond.com/blog/?paged=2)

Like Midge, I'm in the demographic that is sometimes cranky about Twitter.  OK, unlike Midge, I'm downright cantankerous about Twitter, so Midge I apologize for throwing you in the mud-wrestling arena here with me. 

 

TwiTTerature?  Yes they've capitalized the middle "t" letters.  Clever branding tactic or are they so tweeted out that they've forgotten the initial cap goes, well, at the beginning?  Nevertheless, how can the plot of a book, the nuances of a book's characters, or the subtleties of the voice and tone of an author be compressed into 140 characters?  Seriously.  Aren't a lot of book titles longer than 140 characters? 

 

Tweeters Beware: Flashed By Twitter

After not checking my Twitter account in over a month, I logged on to find that Twitter's spam filter is useless.  I had one "follower" with links to extremely pornographic photos.  The account went undetected by Twitter and had not been suspended.  It was as if I had been flashed by the proverbial pervert on the park bench in the tan trench coat--only several perverts, and unfortunately nothing as modest as a raincoat was involved.  Instead: full exposure and multiple participants.  Beyond raunchy.  Another "follower" was an ad for a bogus investment scam.  I blocked both of them, but needless to say, beware: Twitter's monitoring abilities are seriously lacking.

I tried Twitter as an anthropological experiment. Depending on how things went, I considered asking friends/family to join.  Based on these negative experiences and others in the past, I wouldn't subject friends and family to the evils lurking behind Twitter.  I can't imagine having a friend "bump" into these explicitly pornographic photos if they were following my twitter account.  I wouldn't point my worst enemy in the direction of the photos that were a mere click away from me.