Monica Hesse

@Naysayers: Twitter is more complex than it looks. It might even be art. (JG Illustration)

Of Twitterature and Twilosophy

Entire novels have been written through a series of tweets, and interesting tweets have spurred philosophical and thought-provoking discussions. Some of the best tweets, observers say, are open-ended questions. (Photo: WP)

The whole world is on Twitter. Yawn.

Tweets, people will tell you, rot our brains. They ruin our attention spans, inflate our egos. The imperious New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd would rather be eaten alive by ants than be Twittering, or so she said in a recent column.

So let’s keep this thesis statement short, shorter than the 140 characters allowed by the micro-blogging service:

@Naysayers: Twitter is more complex than it looks. It might even be art.

Yes, it’s true: almost everyone appears insanely boring on Twitter. This is because the question Twitter asks its approximately seven million users is, “What are you doing?” And because users can respond to that question via mobile device, the answer is often: “waiting around.” They’re waiting at the DMV. They’re waiting for dinner. They’re at the airport, waiting for a flight, and when they get home they can’t wait to see “Wolverine.”

Ashton Kutcher, the much-heralded Twitterer with the most followers — approaching two million — is no exception.

“We are in the middle of a tornado watch,” he tweeted recently under the name aplusk, waiting for production to resume on set. But we don’t care if stars are insanely boring. Their boring days fascinate us.

Here’s something odd: There are some non-celebrities who amass giant followings. Thousands of strangers tune in for regular updates of these nobodies’ lives.

And something else odd: The next few months will see a slew of books about Twitter. Most of these tomes are 200-plus pages, meaning the books teaching you how to tweet are 3,000 times longer than the longest thing you’ll ever write on Twitter.

Either scads of publishers are fiendishly preying on our technological insecurities …  or creating the perfect tweet actually requires learned skills.

Those in the know say it’s the latter, and offer some guidance.

“There has to be something useful and fundamentally unselfish about a good tweet,” says Laura Fitton, author of “Twitter for Dummies” (insert obvious joke here about Twitter already being for dummies), who as Pistachio has 30,000 followers on Twitter. The best tweets, Fitton says, provide more value to the reader than to the person writing it. The masses of people who “blurt-tweet” and unthinkingly brain-dump into their account will never achieve anything more meaningful than a public diary, she says.

A few weeks ago, Fitton happened to be watching as her young daughter had a nasty fall. Wanting to let out her concern, she briefly considered Twittering the incident, until she realized that that would help nobody and just be white noise to almost everybody. Instead, she ended up writing, “What do you do when something really scares you?”

What could have been a myopic update instead became a participatory discussion — dozens of users began responding to her question, re-posting it in their own feeds.

Twitter is full of questions like this: “Why do people change their minds when it’s too late?” And “What do you do when Plan A doesn’t work?”

The most compelling tweets aren’t the ones that merely answer “What are you doing?” but rather the ones that create ripples throughout the online community. They prompt discussion, self-reflection and philosophizing.

Several connoisseurs of Internet culture, when asked to nominate brilliant Twitterers, suggested tracking down a user called fireland.

“I follow him purely for aesthetics,” says Clay Shirky, author of the social networking bible “Here Comes Everybody.”

“It’s like he has aphoristic dyspepsia. It’s not quite poetry,” but each of his tweets has a self-contained pithiness.

A recent fireland post: “Flowers, sailor suit, flask, proof of employment, Ativan. OK, I think I’m ready for Mother’s Day.”

Another: “If I jump out of the car now I’ll probably break my leg but at least I won’t have to think of something nice to say about her scrapbooking.”

Fireland is copywriter Joshua Allen from Denver, Colorado. The scrapbooking detail is incidental to the story — this tweet is more about universal gender differences: “Girl wants to talk, confrontation-averse Guy doesn’t want to hurt her feelings.”

“I never want my tweets to rely on specific context,” Allen says. “I want them to be something anyone could read and understand.”

That’s a primary difference between Twitter and, say, texting or Facebook status updates. Both of the latter are based on reciprocity and personal knowledge. Tweets, on the other hand, are one-sided — sent out to people you may not know, with the goal of attracting more people you may not know. “It’s more of a performance,” Allen says.

For the fleet-fingered and adventurous, individual tweets are merely a starting place. Writer Matt Richtel recently tweeted an entire novel (a “twiller,” he called it) about a guy who wakes up with amnesia and thinks that he might have committed murder. Its brief installments read like disjointed monologues, peppered with the misspellings (sorry, Oscar de la Renta):

“back to blond. inhale her oscar de la rente. memory pierces amnesia; saw her once with bloody hands. Where? Jesus. Gin please. Please.”

Dinty Moore, an Ohio University professor and editor of literary journal Brevity, thinks the quality of a tweet matters. When sent about a dozen anonymous tweets from various Twitterers, and asked if any of them have the hallmarks of art, Moore selects two. Both are Sacca’s.

Nearly a half-million people agree with Moore’s assessment: Sacca is one of the few non-famous people to regularly appear as one of the 100 most-followed Twitterers, according to Twitterholic.com. He had 417,000 when research for this article began and gained 30,000 more the next week.

Following Sacca’s feed over several days reveals more about his Twitter personality: impish, winking, often faux-clueless.

“It will be unsettling,” he comments one day, “when the oldest woman in the world dies and then we don’t have one anymore.”

Some earnest literalist immediately writes to correct him, to inform him that the next oldest woman will get a promotion.

“Oh, good point,” Sacca responds. “Well, definitely after that woman dies then. Then we’re done. Right?”

The more one follows him, the less it feels like reading about a stranger and the more it feels like keeping up with a favorite satirical author. “In a medium like Twitter, the literary work isn’t the tweet,” says the author of “The Twitter Book,” Tim O’Reilly, “It’s the persona that you’re putting together.”

Whether volumes of Twitterature will enter the literary canon is unknowable.

But if Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker and Oscar Wilde were still alive, they would probably all be on Twitter.


The Washington Post

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