![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Two articles and some musing on twitter
Apr. 15th, 2012 12:17 pmDaniel Mendelsohn, with whom I fell in love when reading his The Lost a few years ago, is on twitter. It's really weird to follow on twitter a writer you love, but the twitter thing is weird, anyway,when it comes to "famous" people you have never interacted with.
I don't tweet myself a lot, even though I was drawn to twitter, at first, for its rule of "up to 140 characters". I saw it as a challenge of concision – a tool that Tacitus would have liked!– and a funny way to come up with neat aphorisms. That was before I realised that some twittos just mircoblogged and used text-message language to "cheat"! The art of aphorism is lost on so many people...
I mostly follow media accounts and academic accounts, in order to get links to interesting articles. I also follow a few French politicians, because this is election year. So basically I use twitter for the news, to get information. It is my very won AFP or Reuters. And twitter can also become a forum when there's an event people all over the world tweet about and you just follow and feed the hashtag said event is about. It's fascinating to see twitter turning into an agora then.
So, basically my use is rather impersonal, and I don't really consider twitter as a "social network". There are exceptions of course. Some LJ friends are on twitter so it's another way to be connected. It's like bumping into someone you know, while walking in the street, and stopping for a moment to say hello or have little chat. I also follow a few artists in order to get updates on their works (like Moffat, Rufus Wainwright, Emily Barker, Bear McCreary, etc...), most of them are performers so twitter is a way to know about albums or gigs.
And of course there's Tom Mcrae, who fits in the later category but is also someone I have met in RL and with whom I sometimes have interactions online. We aren't friends but, after all those years, exchanging words with Tom on the internet doesn't feel like crossing the line. He's familiar enough to me in a way that is similar to my connection with certain distant LJ readers who are on my flist. In other words, there's nothing "sacred" about his online persona. I see him as an equal.
It's another story when it comes to Umberto Eco or Daniel Mendelsohn! I wouldn't dare to reply to one of their tweets...
Why following writers on twitter? To get a glimpse of the person behing the books? Maybe. To extend the connection you once fell when reading their work. Probably. To witness a work in progress and perhaps make out the backstage of creation? Hopefully.
But there's also the fact that we expect them to shine, to use their words mojo within an up-to-140-characters post. Is it possible?
Umberto Eco uses twitter in an interesting way, juggling with Italian and English (but so do I, with French and English), making aphorisms and, above all, bypassing the rule with bursts of multiple tweets, which isn't very refreshing per se, except that, the way he does it, the ending part comes first so his speech scrolls down and you can read his tweets normally, from top to bottom, without losing the right syntax! It means that he has to prepare the whole thing before he starts tweeting.
So far, Mendelsohn's tweets are unimpressive. He seems to use twitter as a social network or as a newsletter for his articles.
By the way, he posted links to two of them, lately:
The first one is a travel tale, titled A Modern Odyssey, in which he tells the Mediterranean cruise he took with his father, following Odysseus' steps. I especially liked the ending of the article:
( Read more... )
The second, Unsinkable, is a long article published on The New Yorker. It's about The Titanic, and of course, being a classicist he studies the event as a Myth.
So I follow him on twitter, but I know the brilliance is elsewhere, and the Mendelsohn I love isn't the tweeting man who exposes himself online, but the one who reveals himself when telling stories.
I don't tweet myself a lot, even though I was drawn to twitter, at first, for its rule of "up to 140 characters". I saw it as a challenge of concision – a tool that Tacitus would have liked!– and a funny way to come up with neat aphorisms. That was before I realised that some twittos just mircoblogged and used text-message language to "cheat"! The art of aphorism is lost on so many people...
I mostly follow media accounts and academic accounts, in order to get links to interesting articles. I also follow a few French politicians, because this is election year. So basically I use twitter for the news, to get information. It is my very won AFP or Reuters. And twitter can also become a forum when there's an event people all over the world tweet about and you just follow and feed the hashtag said event is about. It's fascinating to see twitter turning into an agora then.
So, basically my use is rather impersonal, and I don't really consider twitter as a "social network". There are exceptions of course. Some LJ friends are on twitter so it's another way to be connected. It's like bumping into someone you know, while walking in the street, and stopping for a moment to say hello or have little chat. I also follow a few artists in order to get updates on their works (like Moffat, Rufus Wainwright, Emily Barker, Bear McCreary, etc...), most of them are performers so twitter is a way to know about albums or gigs.
And of course there's Tom Mcrae, who fits in the later category but is also someone I have met in RL and with whom I sometimes have interactions online. We aren't friends but, after all those years, exchanging words with Tom on the internet doesn't feel like crossing the line. He's familiar enough to me in a way that is similar to my connection with certain distant LJ readers who are on my flist. In other words, there's nothing "sacred" about his online persona. I see him as an equal.
It's another story when it comes to Umberto Eco or Daniel Mendelsohn! I wouldn't dare to reply to one of their tweets...
Why following writers on twitter? To get a glimpse of the person behing the books? Maybe. To extend the connection you once fell when reading their work. Probably. To witness a work in progress and perhaps make out the backstage of creation? Hopefully.
But there's also the fact that we expect them to shine, to use their words mojo within an up-to-140-characters post. Is it possible?
Umberto Eco uses twitter in an interesting way, juggling with Italian and English (but so do I, with French and English), making aphorisms and, above all, bypassing the rule with bursts of multiple tweets, which isn't very refreshing per se, except that, the way he does it, the ending part comes first so his speech scrolls down and you can read his tweets normally, from top to bottom, without losing the right syntax! It means that he has to prepare the whole thing before he starts tweeting.
So far, Mendelsohn's tweets are unimpressive. He seems to use twitter as a social network or as a newsletter for his articles.
By the way, he posted links to two of them, lately:
The first one is a travel tale, titled A Modern Odyssey, in which he tells the Mediterranean cruise he took with his father, following Odysseus' steps. I especially liked the ending of the article:
( Read more... )
The second, Unsinkable, is a long article published on The New Yorker. It's about The Titanic, and of course, being a classicist he studies the event as a Myth.
So I follow him on twitter, but I know the brilliance is elsewhere, and the Mendelsohn I love isn't the tweeting man who exposes himself online, but the one who reveals himself when telling stories.
