Print
Email
Share24. Yeah, I came here to check it out, signed up, sat back, and waited. Within a day I had almost 50 followers even though I hadn’t twitted
23. once. Every time I started something it ran too long, as I often do, and being an adherent to the beginning, middle, and ending theory of
22. writing, I found no way of communicating I was happy with. I live with the dreaded red negative number outside the Twitter box. I
21. considered posting cutesy sayings like “The early worm gets eaten by the bird.” Aren’t you glad I didn’t? I’m certainly not going to bother
20. anyone with what I’m actually doing right now. I’m typing, obviously, and anyone who disagrees can meet me outside. But there’s a larger
19. issue at stake here as social networks continue to take over our lives. If there were just one place, I could deal with it, but having to bop back
18. and forth between Facebook and MySpace and Plaxo and Blogger and Skype and Twitter is just too fucking much. I’d rather not know
17. anybody than have to face the mountain of blather, and I don’t mean you personally. All your postings are succinct and precise. You’re a
16. genius. I’m talking about all that other crap out there. What am I doing? Right now? Twitter, do you really want to know? Wading through
15. crap. That’s all I do. This is my first and last twit, though it may go on for a while. I say if you want to believe in evolution, just take a look at
14. the human mind today compared to 20 years ago. Today, our PCs are an extension of our brains, which are intricately connected to everyone
13. else’s brain. 20 years ago, if you wanted to be published, you had to find an editor at a publishing house or newspaper or magazine to reach
12. an audience. Now all you need is a library card. The death of newspapers has less to do with Craig’s List and more to do with the death of the
11. job of editor. In the reader’s quest for the uncensored and thoroughly enlightened version of whatever it is we like, we just Google and find it,
10. whatever it is we’re looking for, it’s there, in abundance. We don’t need no stinking editor. Fuck editors, always telling you what they think
9. you should read. We cut out the middleman and mainline the pure stuff. Like a sculptor who dreams of giant bronze statues, writers dream of
8. expanding their horizons, moving from words, lots of words, to actual sentences that say something, upward to paragraphs that expand upon
7. your every thought, adding up to complete pieces with themes that bind it all together, more than words and sentences and paragraphs, a
6. fluidity of thought that leads to the novel, the final experiment for any budding wordsmith. The evolution of the writer is the constant
5. expansion of your ability to string it along in a larger and larger forum where everything has a coherency that fulfills the reader’s desire for
4. meaning, which is all we’re really looking for. Twitter is the opposite of that. Now that writers are personally involved with their readers,
3. skipping the editor and the publisher, the words flowing directly from one computer to another, the job of middleman has become purely
2. technological. What else is Twitter but a big bad editor telling you how many words you can use, so fuck Twitter too. I only write to size if
1. someone is paying me. It costs to shut me up. Faced with Twitter, Charles Dickens would have a coronary. 140 characters? Bite me.
