The truth is I don't tweet. I have tweeted once. I signed up, signed in, and signed out.
In our creative writing course material, we were given a list of sites to follow. The Plus of tweets is the fact that they are short. Only 140 characters, and that's counting spaces.
The Twitter.com web site promises that "Twitter is without a doubt the best way to share and discover what is happening right now."
I liked the certainty of "without a doubt" and the immediacy of "right now."
What I discovered was a string of personal sentences congratulating this writer or that poet on winning such-and-such a prize. It was the equivalent of electronic chit-chat--maybe birdseed would be an apt metaphor--cluttering up the screen and my day.
I know I'm probably missing something terribly important, but how useful is this:
Lady Gaga has canceled her partnership with Target due to their anti-gay rights donations, a source says.
Or what about this?
The inside of Charlie Sheen's urethra must look like Willy Wonka's boat ride.
And then this display of public grief:
Devastating to hear of Mike Starr succumbing to his illness. So very sad. Our prayers are with his family.
Undaunted, I searched the creative writing sites:
Oh no! Heal quickly, Ms. Didion! RT @LATimesbooks Joan Didion breaks collarbone in fall.
Big announcement next Tues: finalists for RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers to be revealed.
And this from MP Bob Rae:
Congrats to my friend (and constiuent!) Anna Porter for winning the Shaughnessy Cohen book prize!! Great book too - The Ghosts of Europe...
And the French-language version of Châtelaine, the national Canadian women's magazine, recently asked: Je twitte, donc je suis?
Apparently, everyone's doing it. Which is what high school students used to say about some other social activities when we were young. Only that wasn't really true!
For me, I think my time is better spent actually writing. I'll leave the tweeting to the other birds!
Every little swallow, every chick-a-dee
Every little bird in the tall oak tree
The wise old owl, the big black crow
Flappin' their wings singing go bird go
Rockin' robin, tweet tweet tweet
Rockin' robin' tweet tweetly-tweet
correct me if i'm wrong, but this is the 2nd version of this blog post, yes? i returned to it to read once again and ... it seems to say more. the whole twitter world fascinates me, although i myself do not 'tweet', nor do most of the people i know personally. "je twitte, donc je suis" - now that would seem a sorry state of affairs (although i did get a kick out of the expression!)
ReplyDeleteYou're right! Sometimes I have second thoughts or I revise to make a post better.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting that you say that most of the people you know personally do not tweet. I haven't surveyed my friends (the list is small), but I think the result would be similar.
Who does it then? Is it just a narcissistic, individualistic self-promotion tool? Can a writer survive without tweeting?
You're right . . . it is a sad state of affairs if being is equated with tweeting.
ReplyDeleteTo tweet or not to tweet . . . that is the question.