Twitter.com is a program that allows one to post messages of less than one-hundred forty characters, via the Web, email, or text. The messages are formally supposed to respond to a single question: What are you doing now? Each message is called a ‘tweet,’ and others can follow those tweets, to learn what a friend, or even famous person, might be doing. (In the case of a famous & busy person, the messages are likely to be the tweets of an associate or campaign aide.)
Tweets can appear separately on a website, or as a type of blog post. I have experimented with Twitter for a bit, and I like the form, but not the intended function: “What are you doing now?’ is a question that’s narrow and banal.
Fortunately, an American creativity that brought about Twitter also brings about more interesting possibilities for Twitter’s use. A writer at the New York Times is using Twitter to create a thriller in small bites, a work he’s coined a “Twiller.”
Twitter’s brief tweets (constrained as are all SMS – text – messages) might be useful for epigrams, too, if there should be a modern-day Nietzsche who would like to walk that avenue. (It’s not a path that I could or would like to take; from a country of three-hundred million, some others probably will.)
I have no interest in writing a novel. I’ve never yearned to be a writer. Writing is instrumental for me – presenting a committed position and writing to refute contrary views. It’s the issue and position that matter to me. I’ve not been reticent in this regard, and I will not be.
Still, I might hit upon a way to use Twitter for a morsels of a larger work. That’s what’s great about America – Google, Apple, Twitter, and WordPress open up opportunities for millions. I find arguments against these new media timid, pinched, and backward.