1. 20:14 26th Jun 2012

    Notes: 5

    Tags: social mediaTwittermicrobloggingepigramsaphorismsessays

    But two-faced Twitter has also brought about, in its opposite aspect, 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.


    This means that Twitter, officially a microblogging platform, in practice has often functioned in a way opposite to the blog. Of course a tweet is just a tweet, not to be made too much of. Even so, La Rochefoucauld, Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Parker, Cyril Connolly, the Kafka of The Blue Octavo Notebooks, Cioran — they would have been excellent tweeters, and the best tweets, today, rival their greatest one-liners. (In fact to encounter their sententiae parcelled out as tweets would have made for a better experience than reading The Unquiet Grave or The Trouble with Being Born straight through. 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 in a literary culture that otherwise values the merely personal and the super-colloquial as badges of authenticity.

    “Write as short as you can/ In order/ Of what matters,” John Berryman counseled in a pre-tweet of 44 characters. Favorite that, followers.

    — 

    n+1: Please RT

    Via The Millions.

    Crossposted at Reeling and Writhing.

     

  2. 10:04 23rd Jun 2012

    Tags: social mediaSarah Wilson

    are you feeling social media-obliged? | Sarah Wilson

    This post is timely and well-written, if a little on the long side. But its argument has bitten deep if the comments are anything to go by. 

    Do visit and have a listen. I am particularly interested in the number of commenters who suffer a feeling of obligation because of their online commitments.

    It makes me nostalgic for the days of one blog, and tempted to return to that in a trimmed down form. (Though to be honest I usually had at least two blogs at any one time.)