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?
What about grammar, spelling, and punctuation? Without those unifiers to help us interpret the written word, as Lynn Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves cleverly demonstrates, confusion can and will ensue. On Twitter, there is no room for this lavish excess, this "lux" thing called punctuation. And even if there were it would probably be condensed to: Pun2Ashun. It's not about the reader's convenience; it's about the tweeter's convenience.
Tweeting, at best, is terse and convenient; it's certainly not a writing genre. Novel? Play? Script? No. Nope. Definitely not.
And good luck to the librarians who will have to file that tweet book those college students are writing--that twook--by the Dewey Decimal System.
Will it be filed in the 400s: languages? It's possible. It has become a new incomprehensible language. Or will some poor librarian be required to shelve it in the 800s alongside actual literature? In that case, maybe the ALA with host a book burning barbeque. Fire up a huge Weber stainless steel grill, sear both sides of the cover, and then grill it to a crispy twook. I can see some respectable bespectacled librarian asking, "May I offer you ketchup or mustard on your twook?" as she yanks the twook off the grill with her bare hands, impenetrable to the pain, as high octane endorphins course through her veins.
Rather than call it tweeting or twittering, let's just call it "twediting." Shall we? After all, it's editing before the actual writing occurs. Bass-ackward, is the word that comes to mind. Twediting forces the writer to pare thoughts down before forming them. The result: stream-of-consciousness minutiae, incomprehensible thoughts, and randomness. In other words, dribbles and drabbles of drivel.
I'm guilty myself of dribbling this Twitter drivel. I've wasted more time trying to twedit in 140 characters than I have writing a sizable essay when I'm not shackled by such an anemic character count. It's like putting your shoes on then yanking your socks up over them. It reads about as perplexing as that would look. Holy s*&#. Holey socks. Would you walk out of the house like that? Then why write like that?
If I put a Carrie Bradshaw spin on things (thank you Candace Bushnell for all your witty insights), the most generous question I can ask of those enamored with Tweeting and Twittering In or Out of any City is...
As the world around us has become filled with infinite amounts of information and data, is this pared down twediting a backlash against everything we are bombarded with? Or is it an onslaught of yet more information in smaller and more frequent doses? How terse can we get in this limbo game which is undercutting our language? Where will we be by Laybr Day? Howleen? Crismis?
Maybe Tweeting is a chronicling addiction akin to other addictions, say sex, drinking, or gambling. When the first Twitters' Anonymous (TA) meeting is held, will it sound something like this: "Hi Zach here I Tweetaholic six secs sinc tweet feelin twitchy." Will other Tweetaholics still have the ability to clap to support Zach, or will they have grown little tweety wings by then and flap in solidarity?
Maybe the best we can hope for is that twediting is unknowingly a grassroots movement which will penetrate writing, break it down to its purest form--kind of like poetry, but without the alliteration, meter, rhyme, rhythm, and thought that goes into it. Unpoetry. Once Twitter has finally slain the written word, will we be able to rebuild it from the ashes? Start by spelling one word correctly, then form full sentences, and graduate to paragraphs. Eventually fully evolve to attempt essays and books? Can we? If so, let's act quickly, but not briefly.
How can we band together and remove the duct tape that has been tightly wound around our hands (feathers?) leaving us only to tweet twits in small bits? These Twitter people who have done this to us are master illusionists. (Eat your heart out David Blain. You missed the tank on this one.)
Oh. I get it. With painfully gnarled fingers, we will type in short bursts. Our fingers (wings?) will flail around the keyboard. We will hit the wrong keys, but it will cause us so much pain, we won't care. We will care only about brevity to keep the pain at a minimum--never mind the reader's pain in trying to decipher this new garbled language. (Tweeters: the duct tape is a meta4.)
Like most tweety birds, maybe we'll eventually grow beaks. Then we'll peck at the keyboard instead of typing. Maybe that's how humans will devolve in the centuries to come? Dare I say that those of us with big noses will actually be coveted for our big beautiful beaks?
Is it just me or is it possible that these Twitter people are intentionally stingy with the space they parse out to folks? Hasn't it been proven that if you make something scarce that people will want it more? Genius on their part. Economics 101: Basics of Supply and Demand. Maybe not so genius and inventive; maybe just tried and true. Regardless, the cell phone companies and Twitter have put the average teenager's writing skills into a chokehold:
"hey jonas bro tic sal 2mor sold out b4 how many u want im campin out dont wan mis agin cuz nic so hot"
Beyond that, whatever happened to the right to free speech? I guess Twitter's down with that as long as the First Amendment doesn't require you to be articulate or have the need to state your opinion in more than 140 characters. (In Twitter's defense, maybe if the health care bill were twedited it'd finally "pass.")
Carrie Bradshaw-like conclusion: the need to write is primal. This is a good thing. A tweetin' fantastic thing. Twitter, in fact, proves this, but beyond the need to write should be the desire to write something that just might resonate with others. The fur ball that your cat spit up that looks like Jesus, your standing in line at Starbucks ordering a Red Eye with skim milk is not meaningful stuff--except perhaps in the latte, I mean latter, case. Starbucks gets free advertising every time you tweet about them. Of course they employ their own marketing folks to tweet about all things Starbucks, but they love you unpaid Starbucks evangelizers who tweet about Ventis, Grandes, and Frappuccinos (there goes another unpaid plug). And speaking of Starbucks, where's the apostrophe?
Maybe once we free ourselves from the duct tape that never was there, yet mysteriously bound us into blind character count submission, we can unfurl our contorted sticky fingers, spread our literary wings and soar. Then, maybe we can heal from this word crippling addiction and write in an unfettered manner instead of merely twediting. Maybe this requires a protest on our part. I hate to give the Twitteratweeps a plot summary of Oliver Twist for their book, but it could be akin to something as small as a Dickensonian plea uttered by the starving Oliver to his master, "Please, sir, I want some more." Please, Twitter, I want some more words.
Post-conclusion: there are so many writers who thankfully were never exposed to tweeting and hopefully won't be poached by the Twitteratures or should I say Twitteraturists? Whatever they call themselves, it'd better be short.
Sure, some books required Cliff Notes to make sense of back in the day, then came the less reliable Spark Notes to help an undergraduate or graduate student slog through some overly verbose writer. I'm not saying I couldn't skip a hundred or so pages of a certain writer whose first name sounds like a common type of edible fish (and it's not tuna). I make an exception here to say that the Twitteraturons should suggest he twedit a few of his books, or should I say twedit a few verses. Yes, I feel the scorn of many a literature professor right now, but I know for a fact that some of you Ivy League professors actually agree with me, but I won't out you here. And yes I have contradicted myself, but writing is full of contradictions if you take more than 140 characters to explore your thoughts.
Needless to say, the list of writers whose work can't be condensed is endless. Having the conversation about which ones can't, perhaps is a way to spark interest in reading or rereading some of these authors before they appear in TwiTTerature and are 4ever defiled and twedited in our minds. Everything from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, to Dr. Seuss's Yertle the Turtle, to anything by David Sedaris immediately comes to mind. How about you? Or U?
Carole Flynn is the author of Literary Itinerary and Literary Unleashed.
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