Please Retweet

I had read this in the print edition of N+1 a little while ago and had intended to post it earlier than this, but here you go anyway. It examines Twitter in a literary sense, and what it means for language:

Of course a tweet is just a tweet, not to be made too much of. Even so, La Rochefoucauld, Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Parker, Cyril Connolly, the Kafka of The Blue Octavo Notebooks, Cioran — they would have been excellent tweeters, and the best tweets, today, rival their greatest one-liners. (In fact to encounter their sententiae parcelled out as tweets would have made for a better experience than reading The Unquiet Grave or The Trouble with Being Born straight through. Aphorisms are ideally consumed like nuts or candies, a handful at a time.) So Twitter doesn’t only have the widely recognized usefulness of providing updates on news and revolution, and illuminating links, and many laughs and smirks. It has also brought about a surprising revival of the epigrammatic impulse in a literary culture that otherwise values the merely personal and the super-colloquial as badges of authenticity. “Write as short as you can/ In order/ Of what matters,” John Berryman counseled in a pre-tweet of 44 characters. Favorite that, followers.

I'm on Twitter, but I'm far from a compulsive tweeter; I have this blog for that sort of thing. Mostly, it's useful when you need to chew up a little time while waiting for a class to start or during an awkward moment when the last thing you want is to be seen doing nothing. Twitter can be useful in that sense. But it's also an excellent conduit for information when news breaks, like last night's Colorado shooting, or for simple pleasure, frivolity, and celebrity. Twitter is not a revolutionary literary form, but it's not the end of language, eloquence, or long form reporting and journalism.

We tend to live in a world which thinks for better or worse that it's either everything or nothing. We also live in a world that is generally wrong about most things, but it's especially wrong when it comes to language.

Stephen Fry, who is known for his prolific twitterings, likes to liken use of the website to the letters of Lord Byron, who in an effort to save money when he sent messages to England would use an extraordinary number of abbreviations. Yours became yrs, or something like that. As you can imagine, this language of convenience did not prohibit him from writing conventionally when he needed to. It bears a great deal of resemblance to text language today, does it not?