Good Things About Twitter

Several light-years ago in Web time, Jonathan Franzen spoke at Tulane University and said that he found Twitter “unspeakably irritating,” expressing a concern for “serious readers and writers” and the medium’s inability to “cite facts or create an argument.” I like that Franzen doesn’t sound like a celebrity worried about reducing friction and shifting units. He is the Kanye West of fiction: popular, gifted, influential, and willing to make unpopular statements without the intervention of handlers.

But Thomas Jones at the London Review of Books points out that Franzen makes a “category error” by pitching Twitter users against serious readers/writers. The two coëxist, happily. Maud Newton and Sarah Weinman are some of the closest readers I know, and using Twitter has not hampered their ability to create arguments or to be serious. Authors are on Twitter: Sheila Heti, Lynne Tillman, Margaret Atwood, Colson Whitehead, and Neil Gaiman come to mind most quickly, though they are hardly alone.

One of the most felicitous uses of Twitter is to promote long-form nonfiction by circulating a blurb leading to the full text. Since the practice started, people have shared current long magazine and newspaper pieces and dusted off archival ones. Now organizations like @longform and @longreads and @TheByliner work specifically to find and share excellent pieces that stretch up to three thousand words and beyond. Before Twitter, I was reading half as much extended nonfiction and fiction as I do now on the iPhone or iPad, using apps like Readability and Instapaper.

Two pernicious fallacies embedded in criticism of Twitter—and, by extension, blogs, tumblrs, and GIFs of catbots who kill with laser eyes—are that non-traditional forms of expression can wipe out existing ones, and that these forms are somehow impoverished. The variables unique to the Internet—hyperlinks, GIFs, chat, comments—have enabled new writing voices with their own distinct syntaxes. But we are not dealing with fungible goods—the new forms will never push out older ones because they’re insufficiently similar. You might overdose on unicorn GIFs and go to bed too tired to read “Freedom,” but unicorn GIFs will never replace “Freedom.”

Four years ago, the New York Times Magazine published a cover story by Emily Gould that included anecdotes about her blogging while young and appearing on television because of that blogging. Many of the 1216 comments that were posted (before the Times closed the thread) expressed a fear that publishing first-person writing of this sort about first-person writing of another sort might imperil “worthwhile” reporting. Last Sunday’s magazine featured crack reporting on gambling, silence, and China, so this fear seems to have been groundless.

As for Franzen’s concerns about rigor: citing facts and creating arguments is one of Twitter’s strongest features. Or, to be more accurate, Twitter is good at letting facts circulate through argument. One example is the emergency landing of US Airways Flight 1549 on the morning of January 15, 2009. As the plane was gliding onto the Hudson River, I was heading into a subway station in Brooklyn and checking Twitter on my iPhone. Friends with river views on the West Side of Manhattan were tweeting things like “Holy shit, a plane just landed in the river.” When you have used Twitter for a while, you know to hang fire and wait for rumors to gel. The length of a train ride is about right.

By the time I had surfaced in Manhattan, my feed was filled with personal accounts and statements from news organizations. The amateurs had not gotten it wrong; a goddamned plane had landed in the goddamned Hudson. Hearing from a human with a west-facing window won’t necessarily enhance the historical record, but it did enhance the moment, and I am not above that kind of adrenaline Scooby Snack. Increasingly, the historical record ends up folding in this type of citizen journalism right alongside pieces by professional reporters, many of whom are dedicated Twitter users.

But sometimes the plane isn’t a plane and an unsubstantiated rumor takes wing. (Kim Jong-il assassinated? Rowan Atkinson dead?) Twitter is both where the untruth flies first and where it gets shot down. It’s sort of a self-cleaning oven, where the wisdom of the crowd can work out the kinks. A reliable version of events generally emerges because vanity (in the form of a visible number of retweets for the user who posts the canonical version) fuels the process, much as a writer’s byline can press ego into the service of good writing.

That’s the vegetables. What else is on Twitter? A poetic spambot named Horse_ebooks that spits out isolated phrases like “monopoly on your radio” or fragments like “33 Dependence on chance may seem a burden and a limitation on fraternity.” Occasionally this found poetry comes with a link to a terrible e-book such as Pizza Recipes, which would seem to be the original purpose of Horse_ebooks. Adrian Chen of Gawker recently reported on the feed’s origin (Russia) and purpose (inept commerce) and poetic engine (maybe automated, maybe human). Why do more than fifty-five thousand people follow Horse_ebooks? Because he/it tweets “Pocket Change Written Plan Ball Games Family Haircuts” and, after you’ve read the name Santorum for the 456th time, these are the words that keep hope alive.

Comedians do well. (One-liners and that.) The deliciously perverse Megan Amram has the best avatar around, and bats way above .750. Some recent entries: “It’s cool how in England they call trucks ‘lorries’ and dentists ‘never’” and this dyad: “HOW DO YOU TURN OFF CAPS LOCK” and “OK AWESOME I THINK I FIGURED OUT HOW TO TURN OFF CAPS LOCK.” If you want more perversity, follow Rob Delaney; for more familiar perversity, go to Sarah Silverman; and for a melancholy blend of perversity and directness, there’s Lena Dunham. All free, all day long.

How does a common squirrel like to spend its afternoon? Now you know. What does dubstep sound like? Let Twitter tell you. Every word in the English language, being tweeted one by one? Yes. A reporter’s dog? A faithful user. If that sounds like ephemera and you are drifting towards Franzenian irritation, look to the literary canon that has been ported onto Twitter by fans. All of Shakespeare, line by line; sentences from Donald Westlake alter ego Richard Stark; or quotes from Philip Larkin. The critic asks: Why not read them in the original? The supporter offers: all of these sentences, stripped of context, reveal strengths that are washed over when taken up in the river of narrative.

It takes an investment to make Twitter work. You need to edit and trim your feed for weeks, or months, to find the people who link to relevant material, write elegantly within a small space (a good exercise for any writer), and don’t tweet too much. If you’re unconvinced, then here are feeds that confirm how Twitter is not like another form, and does things that cannot be done elsewhere: Wise Kaplan and ElBloombito and Jenny Holzer, Mom and I’m out of characters.

Illustration by Jordan Awan.