I have a complex and difficult relationship with Twitter.

No other content strategy strategy or social media platform has done more for me. My feed has gotten me an agent and several jobs; it’s connected to to innumerable people who have become friends and colleagues, collaborators and co-conspirators. It’s gotten me in the newspaper for swearing, repeatedly.

For example, David Gilmour gave a disastrous interview with Emily M. Keeler in Hazlitt, where some things he said included:

I’m not interested in teaching books by women. Virginia Woolf is the only writer that interests me as a woman writer, so I do teach one of her short stories. But once again, when I was given this job I said I would only teach the people that I truly, truly love. Unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women. Except for Virginia Woolf. And when I tried to teach Virginia Woolf, she’s too sophisticated, even for a third-year class. Usually at the beginning of the semester a hand shoots up and someone asks why there aren’t any women writers in the course. I say I don’t love women writers enough to teach them, if you want women writers go down the hall. What I teach is guys. Serious heterosexual guys. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Tolstoy. Real guy-guys. Henry Miller. Philip Roth.

So I tweeted a bunch of things in response, including:

The National Post, in this article, characterized this and my other tweets as follows: “Toronto-based writer and critic Natalie Zed responded to Mr. Gilmour’s interview with an afternoon’s worth of insults and obscenities.” Presumably without actually reading this or my other tweets, Naomi Lakritz at the Calgary Herald wrote a whole article about how I’m “helping to perpetuate the troll culture that flourishes online.”

Why, just yesterday, Adam Baldwin called me a Social Justice Warrior. What more could a person who lives on the internet ask for.

I’m also fairly certain Twitter is destroying me as a writer.

* * *

At the beginning of “It Looks Like You’re Writing A Letter: Microsoft word, Matthew Fuller describes a scene in which a writer, working at a word processor, is wired to a bomb; as soon as the writer is no longer forming grammatically sound sentences at a quick enough rate, the bomb goes off. That explosion is inevitable.

Being on Twitter is like being hooked up to that explosive device, only rather than being blown to smithereens, the risk is the loss of your audience. Like a crown gathered to gawk at a car accident, your readership disperses quickly on the platform if you’re no longer as active, as funny, as engaging as you once were. It’s not enough to build a reputation for providing commentary on a curated list of topics; you have to stick to the rules and the strategy you’ve build, or your readership wanders away. It’s the publishing cycle at its most drastically compressed: instant gratification, or abandonment.

It’s not the ever-present hum of this threat, that your readers might just up and leave you at a moment’s notice, that bothers me about Twitter; it’s what all those tweets are adding up to any way. It’s what’s being constructed, other than a personal brand or the idea of a platform. I’m apparently teetering on the edge of my 55,000^th tweet, 7,700,00 characters thrown out into the universe. Those words and phrases and ideas haven’t been building books, they’ve been part of a feed, something that scrolls past and disappears.

In the first section of his piece, Fuller notes that “all word processing programs exist at the threshold between the public world of the document and those of the user. These worlds may be subject to non-disclosure agreements; readying for publication; hype into new domains of intensity or dumbness; subject to technical codes of practice or house style; meeting or skirting round deadlines; weedling or speeding.” Twitter exists at an intersection that is even more public, and, like Word, also has the potential to “detour or expand these drives, norms and codes in writing” in sometimes catastrophic ways.

* * *

Three things make Twitter wonderful: constraint, community and ephemerality.

These three ideas correspond, roughly to three concepts that Alan Liu explores in “Transcendental Data: Toward a Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse”: content management, transmission management and consumption management (56-57). The content is managed via the constraint that it is placed under via the strict character limit; it is transmitted to an ever-changing, mercurial and deeply interactive audience; and it is consumed in a way that highlights both the intensity and impermanence of the platform. It is perhaps the ephemerality of Twitter, and the way this effects the way writing on Twitter is consumed, that is the most important point here; a central mechanic of the way the platform works is how quickly things appear, attract attention, and then sink back into the massive flow of content.

Originally conceived of as a micro-blogging platform, one of the great strengths of the medium is how innately restricted it is. With only 140 characters to express yourself, everything is clipped and contained, the most meanings squeezed into the smallest space. It’s still possible to go on a tear, of course, to rant, but there can be no wall of text, only a broken chain, each unit to be engaged with individually or ignored, retweeted in entirety or cherry picked. It forces you to communicate in a very specific way, distilled and heightened, a series of love letters on post-it notes.

While there is pleasure in creating in the pleasant containment of the medium, the real appeal of Twitter is the community it gives you access to, and with it the intoxicating allure of instant feedback. It’s like having a laugh track kick in the moment you say something funny. Thee’s an instant response to anything you say: a deluge of support or derision, and even the ominous silence is a kind of feedback. Each tweet has potential, even from someone with a small or highly curated following; a particularly clever though, a few strategic boosts and that lonely line tossed off into the world can accrue hundreds and even thousands of retweets and responses. Anyone can be a trending topic, representing a kind of virality that provides a variation on the idea of fifteen minutes of fame. But it’s not the potential scale of the audience that truly seductive, but how immediately that audience, of any size, responds. It’s the instantaneousness of the feedback (and the brevity of any content’s life span on the platform) that is appealing. Even with the incredibly compressed cycle of content online, the half life of blog posts and articles is unquestionably longer. For instance, I was interviewed by Feministing about pathologizing kink in 2012, and suddenly it made the front page of Metafilter in August.

Twitter trades the potential for this slightly longer content cycle for the ability to be read, responded to, critiqued or attacked immediately. Feedback is not something you need to wait for; it’s all live and all happening in real time. This immediacy also has some dangerous and hilarious consequences. For example, when PR executive Justine Sacco tweeted something terribly racist and then got on a plane, the online world erupted while she was obliviously offline. Articles were written; the hashtag #hasjustinelandedyet started to trend; Sacco was fired. An entire news cycle rose and fell before she disembarked to find herself, for a brief moment, a villain on the Internet.

There is a flip side to the speed and immediacy of engagement on Twitter, and that is its ephemerality. Things disappear into the flow of your feed, and even the most engaged and devoted audience is going to miss most of what you write. There are ways to extend the life of tweets of course — Storify for longer conversations, screen shots for tweets you suspect might be soon deleted — all of which attempt to put individual together into larger narratives, to map the conversations that break off and build, rhisomatically, off of a single tweet. Despite these tools, tweets represent content that is, for the most part, meant to be lost.

There’s something about this aspect of Twitter — the way the form blithely does not care that so much of the content it generates will, by nature of the way the mechanism works, be missed entirely — that reminds me of Fuller’s statement in the “Word Processing” section of his article that “effective human-machine integration required that people and machines be comprehended in similar terms so that human-machine systems could be engineered to maximise the performance of both kinds of component.” It’s not important that the content is read; it is important that it is generated. Where Twitter and word differ profoundly, however, is that rather than the “end point” of Word that Fuller points to, when “every possible document will be ready for production by the choice of correct template and the ticking of the necessary thousands of variable boxes,” Twitter strips down the tools of composition to an empty box to fill with words, or the means to copy content, to replicate content and help it spread via retweets. Virus vs. Bacteria.

* * *

So how the hell is Twitter, not as a platform but as an actual medium, useful for writing, and worth examining as a tool for building digital texts? Firstly, it teaches us that our work is disposable, and this is immensely freeing. The impermanence of the form helps erode whatever concepts of ownership over our work and ideas we might cling to, and also helps diminish the notion that every thought we have is a precious gold nugget that deserves to be held up and polished. It reinforces the truth that we are all idea machines, and even if we give every one of our ideas away, we’ll keep on having new ones every moment.

This is also whyI worry that Twitter is making me, in particular, a different and possibly less effective writer: by encouraging me to throw everything away, I may also be refusing to hold on to the raw ore that does deserve refining. The key, I think, is to turn Twitter into a tool that aids in the refinement, in the sorting of raw material, the sieve through which we pass our ideas to see what is the most valuable. In seeing how the vast and amorphous audience we accrue responds to each granular thought, we can test out what works and what doesn’t. We take the lines and stories and ideas that get the best responses and work with them, make them better; we can treat our followers as beta testers for our writing.

Even if we regard twitter as a tool for creating digital texts, engaging in this process unquestionably changes the writing that emerges from it. Twitter as a medium has given rise to its own genres, perhaps the most recognizable of which is the phenomenon of the livetweet. Every event and encounter has the potential to become breaking online news in this way. Livetweets can range from the typical format of attending any kind of event and relaying it via quotations, observations, commentary, like live reviews in real time, to accidentally overhearing and narrativizing breakups in public places, Eavesdropping 2.0.

Beyond the livetweet, there are self-contained incarnations of Twitter that aren’t intended for a life outside the platform, and also aren’t rooted in non-fiction. Some of these are pieces of absurdist beauty, like Horse ebooks, which dismantled spam and affiliate marketing into broken gems of text; some break other texts by fragmenting them into the constraint of the medium, like Vanessa Place‘s retyping of the entirety of Gone With The Wind; some are just wondrous strange, like Kimmy Waters’ feed (a/k/a @arealliveghost). [What Would Twitter Do?, an interview series by Sheila Heti for The Believer, is a great source for some of the most compelling uses for Twitter currently running]. These feeds tackle the problem that Liu touches on when he writes, “consider the problem of sending a poem over the internet to a distant computer without knowing exactly what program will receive it, the nature of the processing or display technologies at the other end, or even the remote user’s purpose” (52). While each project, or feed, or series of eruptions is profoundly different in its method and means, the one thing all these accounts have in common is that the successful ones are the weirdest, the most broken.

* * *

I’m honestly not sure I’ve succeeded in doing anything here but having feelings about Twitter, in the context of this week’s readings. Perhaps at best I’ve puzzled out that is stands at the centre of a Venn diagram between word processor, social media platform, tool and transmitter, something akin to what Liu calls “The tight, tense marriage between content and materiality/form” (74). Whether it’s being used as a box to fit words in or one to stand on, it’s a tool that frustrates me, and one I don’t quite knowhow to use properly yet, but will continue to bang my head against.

Works Cited

Baldwin, Adam (@AdamBaldwin). “In which @CBCCommunity weighs in with #SJW’s false #Gamergate narrative: https://archive.today/iLrBr #WomenAgainstFeminism #NotYourShield.” 1 October 2014, 2:48 pm. Tweet.

Dusenbery, Maya. “A Conversation About Kink with Natalie Zina Walschots.” Feministing.

May 9, 2012. <http://feministing.com/2012/05/09/a-conversation-about-kink-with-natalie-zina-walschots/>

Fuller, Matthew. “It Looks Like You’re Writing A Letter: Microsoft Word.” Nettime.org. September 5, 2000. <http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0009/msg00040.html>

Hopper, Tristin and Mark Medley. “David Gilmour now the centre of literary firestorm for syllabus stock only with ‘serious heterosexual guys.’” The National Post. September 26, 2013. <http://arts.nationalpost.com/2013/09/26/david-gilmour-now-the-centre-of-literary-firestorm-for-syllabus-stock-only-with-serious-heterosexual-guys/>

Keeler, Emily M. “David Gilmour on Building Strong Stomachs.” Hazlitt. September 25, 2013. <http://penguinrandomhouse.ca/hazlitt/blog/david-gilmour-building-strong-stomachs>

Lakritz, Naomi. “Throw The Book At Trolls Who Attacked U of T Professor.” The Calgary Herald. September 29, 2013. <http://www.calgaryherald.com/opinion/op-ed/Lakritz+Throw+book+trolls+attacked+instructor/8969954/story.html>

Liu, Alan. “Transcendental Data: Toward A Cultural History and Aesthetics of the New Encoded Discourse.” Critical Inquiry 31 (Autumn 2004): 49-84.

Nisen, Max. “IAC PR Director Lands In South Africa After Racist Tweet, And It’s A Mess.” Business Insider. December 21, 2013. <http://www.businessinsider.com/justine-sacco-landing-live-tweeting-2013-12#ixzz3EyVMA3RZ>

Walschots, Natalie Zina (@NatalieZed). “The spirit of Virgina Woolf tucks David Gilmour in every night, pressing a kiss to his brow to protect him from all the other women.” 25 September 2013, 11:43 am. Tweet.