I think I get twitter now – the tweet is the gold standard for the sentence.
It’s brief, requires little context to cohere standing alone, rewards wit, demands an editorial eye, and is simple to explain and practice.
There is a recognisably ‘twitter friendly’ way of seeing the world, a combination of declarative descriptions and internal observations.
Reading a twitter-feed is like speaking to a public figure set to ‘sound-bite’. Everyone is ‘always on’, a strange struggle to see play out.
‘livetweeting’ is the noun for long-form tweeting. Tweets ought to retain a meaning either with their sisters, or individually.
Twitter is interesting for reporting because it conveys the passing of time, the development of events, without cluttering the text.
When you cannot find a thought to hang as a tweet, you don’t have anything to say.
Tweeting nothing is relatively rare compared to articles that repeat themselves and paragraphs that say (comparatively) little.
People that use the 140 character limit to neglect punctuation aren’t playing to a high enough standard.
I still don’t know what to say to people who ask how to use hashtags. I do know that I wish I had them in real life though.
Do we need paragraphs? If we rely less on relating our sentences to each other, should we bother grouping them? #therearetoolsforthat
Think how many words are used to establish ‘who is speaking to who’ in fiction. We could lose that too. #therearetoolsforthat
Questions of style are maybe irrelevant if you’re only here to share links, network, cluster-fawn over celebrities or whatever. This is sad.
It feels like in Twitter I’ve finally found a form of ‘reality media’ that I can happily lose myself in. Aren’t people fascinating etc
If anyone reads anything decent about the ‘style’ of tweets, of different tweeters, of this evolution, of its applications, let me know.
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For the curious this is the above formatted as a standard paragraph.
I think I get twitter now – the tweet is the gold standard for the sentence. It’s brief, requires little context to cohere standing alone, rewards wit, demands an editorial eye, and is simple to explain and practice. There is a recognisably ‘twitter friendly’ way of seeing the world, a combination of declarative descriptions and internal observations. Reading a twitter-feed is like speaking to a public figure set to ‘sound-bite’. Everyone is ‘always on’, a strange struggle to see play out. ’livetweeting’ is the noun for long-form tweeting. Tweets ought to retain a meaning either with their sisters, or individually. Twitter is interesting for reporting because it conveys the passing of time, the development of events, without cluttering the text. When you cannot find a thought to hang as a tweet, you don’t have anything to say. Tweeting nothing is relatively rare compared to articles that repeat themselves and paragraphs that say (comparatively) little. People that use the 140 character limit to neglect punctuation aren’t playing to a high enough standard. I still don’t know what to say to people who ask how to use hashtags. I do know that I wish I had them in real life though. Do we need paragraphs? If we rely less on relating our sentences to each other, should we bother grouping them? #therearetoolsforthat Think how many words are used to establish ‘who is speaking to who’ in fiction. We could lose that too. #therearetoolsforthat Questions of style are maybe irrelevant if you’re only here to share links, network, cluster-fawn over celebrities or whatever. This is sad. It feels like in Twitter I’ve finally found a form of ‘reality media’ that I can happily lose myself in. Aren’t people fascinating etc. If anyone reads anything decent about the ‘style’ of tweets, of different tweeters, of this evolution, of its applications, let me know.
