Let me begin with a confession- I have never tweeted. I have always considered the 140 character email, which is what a tweet is, an abomination and a curse upon good writing and communication and something which should be confined to juvenile teenagers. So with that said, it is still possible to have a clear attitude towards the new emerging phenomenon of Twitter where even presidents, sadly, have fallen a prey to this fad.
“Few things could appear much worse, to the lurker, glimpser, or guesser, than this scrolling suicide note of Western civilization.” Say the editors of N+1 magazine, “ Never more than 140 characters at a time? Looks like the human attention span crumbling like a Roman aqueduct. The endless favoriting and retweeting of other people’s tweets? Sounds like a digital circle jerk. Birds were born to make the repetitive, pleasant, meaningless sounds called twittering." But people?
Of course, there are some compensations if you sign up for a Twitter account with someone intelligent. At its best, Twitter can delight and instruct. Somebody, often somebody you wouldn’t expect, condenses the World-Spirit into a great joke or epigram. "What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed," you think. A tweet is so short that you can get right to the point . Thus Twitter has brought about the very last thing to have been expected from the internet: a renovation of the epigram or aphorism, a revaluation of the literary virtues of terseness and impersonality. 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. “Write as short as you can/ In order/ Of what matters,” John Berryman counseled in a pre-tweet of 44 characters.
Also, argue the proponents of Tweets, through friends may let you know what they think you should read, hear, watch. But are you friends with the famous environmentalist who, live-tweeting the apocalypse, tells you each time a new locality sets an April heat record in March? Or with Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose ghost had a feed? The San Antonio-based market-research firm Pear Analytics analyzed 2,000 tweets (originating from the US and in English) over a two-week period in August 2009 from 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM (CST) and separated them into six categories:
- Pointless babble – 40%
- Conversational – 38%
- Pass-along value – 9%
- Self-promotion – 6%
- Spam – 4%
- News – 4%
The fact is that most tweets say nothing worthwhile. It is like “I have nothing to say but I want to say something anyway.”
The rise of the Tweet, there are over 140 million active users as of 2012, generating over 340 million tweets daily and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day, takes place amid an internet-induced cheapening of language, in both good and bad senses. The economic cheapness of digital publication democratizes expression and gives a necessary public to writers, and types of writing, that otherwise would be confined to the hard drive or the desk drawer. And yet the supreme ease of putting words online has opened up vast new space for carelessness, confusion, whateverism.
Closely related to but in a different category altogether is the world of blogging. The accidental progenitor of the bloggers style is David Foster Wallace. What distinguishes Wallace’s writing from the prose it begot is a fusion of the scrupulous and the garrulous; all of our colloquialisms, typically diffusing a mist of vagueness over the world, are pressed into the service of exactness. To a generation of writers, the DFW style was the sound of telling the truth, as — in an opposite way — the flat declaratives and simplified vocabulary of Hemingway were for a different generation. But an individual style, terse or wordy, can breed a generalized mannerism, and the path once cleared to saying things truly and well is now an obstacle course. In the case of the blogging, institutional and technological pressures coincided with Wallace’s example. Bloggers have little or no editing to deal with, and if they blogged for money they needed to produce, produce. The combination has discouraged the stylistic virtues of concision, selectivity, and impersonality.
So we must wait till this fad too runs its course or a new fad requiring only 44 characters emerges!
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