For the enjoyment and passion of words, thoughts and disciplines
Give me Twitter or give me death
Ian Brown -- March 27, 2009 -- From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Six million North Americans now tweet. Is it a bid to stave off the randomness of fate, or is it the Tower of Babble?
The thought that people like to Twitter because they're afraid of dying occurred to me shortly after I read that Natasha Richardson, the actress, had died in a freakish skiing accident. A few days afterward, 18-year-old Jafari Williamson stepped off a train near Toronto and minutes later fell under it.
Sudden, random catastrophes, and the quick chill they produce at the breakfast table: It was Ms. Richardson's and Mr. Williamson's blithe ignorance of their own looming fates that was terrifying to think about.
Randomness is the hooligan we all fear. Unmerited suffering, the premature death of loved ones, physical disaster — these are the sources of what Julian Huxley, the famous evolutionary biologist, called "injustice at the hands of the cosmos." That cosmic injustice "represents the persistence of chance and its amorality in human life."
So — I thought — what's the standard answer to the awful fact that none of us knows how or when we'll die?
Carpe diem. Live for today, in the moment, while you can: This is it, it's not a rehearsal, today is the first day, etc.
And what is Twitter? Twitter is a communications technology, a form of mass instant messaging, that specializes in recording the details of life in the moment.
Over the box on their computers and phones where Twitterers type their tweets (their word, not mine) is always the same question, the Twitter dictum: "What are you doing?"
Twitterers answer that question in 140-character reports tossed into the Twittersphere. They cite thoughts and websites, music, moods, dreams, longings, fury, koans, regrets.
And why? Because, the Twitter website says, "eating a sandwich becomes a lot more interesting in the context of Twitter." What does that mean? It means this: Eating a sandwich becomes interesting, even important, if the action only has to occupy a moment of time. To be judged unimportant, a notion has to have pretensions to enduring value. A tweet doesn't last long enough for decay and judgment to set in.
A. J. Liebling said he was as good a writer as he knew, for someone who wrote as fast as he did. Twitter aspires to a similar standard. Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, once tweeted "Taking two Advil." He knows that details make stories. A reporter pointed out that he could have been slyly shilling for the manufacturer.
Mr. Dorsey replied that he just didn't want to spell "ibuprofen."
His career path could be a diagnosis for ADHD: He flitted from podcasting to mobile telephony to the taxi- and courier-dispatch software business before he hatched the idea for Twitter. These days he's tweeting from Spain, where he seems to be eating well.
The lure of Twitter is the lure of Right Now. There is no death in the moment of Right Now: There is only where/what/why/who I am. If you are tweeting or tweeted, you are not dead, yet.
That was my theory.
Or, as my wife said over breakfast when I asked her why people Twittered, "People are terrified of being invisible. They need to be seen." That's why there are six million Twitterers in North America now, six times as many as there were a year ago.
It was at this point that I had my next major brainwave (two a day is my limit): Would it be possible to discuss my theory — Twitterization and its discontents — on Twitter?
One problem: Twitter messages are 140 characters, tops. This sentence, for instance, is exactly 140 characters long, which you can see, ladies, isn't nearly enough space to essay much of a theory.
But the discipline of compression is part of Twitter's charm. Brevity and the management of candour are essential. One must, as Mark Twain advised, "eschew surplusage." Characters count down from 140 above the message window as you type. I imagined that each character costs a dime, and every time I brought my tweet down in size with a disciplined elision, I was saving money — good work, Brown, there's a financial crisis on! I felt like James Bond, with the nuclear device ticking down to zero. Strangely thrilling.
It's possible to write compelling prose in 140 characters. Writer Arjun Basu posts 140-character short stories on Twitter (he was profiled in The Globe and Mail this week); Ruth Reichl, the editor of Gourmet, and Susan Orlean, the New Yorker writer and author of The Orchid Thief, both Twitter elegantly. Someone pretending to be Christopher Walken — Twitter has several Walken imposters — posts tweets that are zen-like in their weird Walkenic enthusiasm and clarity:
If I controlled the auto industry, I would shift the emphasis back to full-sized sedans.
So we tried it. A conversation about death and Twittering was to take place at noon on Wednesday. I had typed the third sentence of my theory before the damn thing galloped away from me. It kept galloping for an hour and a half. People had a lot to say. It was more like tossing firecrackers than writing. By the end, 90 minutes later, nearly 16,000 readers had taken a gander at Twittering as an unconscious response to the fear of death. This is either a very good sign, or proof that the end is nigh.
It was exhausting, like climbing into a clothes dryer for a ride. Fifteen new tweets popped up every minute. Some of the Twitterers agreed: I tweet, therefore I am. Others demurred. There was a sub-conversation about tweets as epitaphs, as the archive of a life; another about what constitutes real intimacy.
And those were the highlights. Twitter lets everyone talk at once — much faster than Twitter's computers can react, if the conversation is of any size, which makes it impossible to control.
I suspect this is why a certain breed of writer and journalist — and most people over 45, only 11 per cent of whom use Twitter, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, are wary of tweeting.
Twitter is one more symptom of the culture war being fought right now between society's Engineers — smart, extroverted, optimistic people who believe technology can solve everything — and its Naturalists, equally smart people who tend to side with the private mind, in the sad, lonely beauty of its isolation.
Most Naturalists don't want to maintain control over the media or its message, as some Engineers and their marketing monkeys insist. But they do write to stay unavailable, to keep the world at bay until they have figured out what they think and what is true. There's nothing wrong with that methodology; it has produced the theory of evolution and Cézanne's paintings and the novel Lolita and Gandhi's political theories, to cite a few gems of quiet introspection.
But this is why it is reassuring to actually try Twittering. Because even a brief stroll through Twitterville proves Twittering won't replace long-form writing (much less online newspapers, as even Jack Dorsey admits).
Proof? The transcript of our Give-me-Twitter-or-give-me-death chatfest (the Twittered archive). It's indecipherable. It reads like the transcript of a radio show in which everyone shouts at once. Twittering is essentially radio in electronic print form, with links. The absence of a central filter is what makes Twittering so pleasant and energetic and optimistic in the moment, and what makes it chaotic afterward.
Twitter is already evolving, of course. Google is rumoured to be willing to pay $3-billion for it. (A lot of money for a company that had 25 employees in December.) Yammer, a competitor of Twitter, is trying to make its service pay (Twitter is free) by tweaking tweeting in a more professional direction: It asks not "What are you doing?" but "What are you working on?"
Even so, the average Twitter user is 31 (not a teenager), urban and almost certain to own a personal digital assistant. More than half read newspapers every day (albeit online, three-quarters of the time). That doesn't sound like the profile of a bunch of revolutionaries, or even a group to be afraid of.
Computers are replacing human beings in more and more venues in which public life was once enacted — at the bank, in meetings, at work, at the library, at the newsstand, dating, chatting. People need to replace lost face time somehow. Tweeting does that. It can't address the horror of dying, as someone noted during the dryer tumble. But it may ease our fear of dying alone.
Six million North Americans now tweet. Is it a bid to stave off the randomness of fate, or is it the Tower of Babble?
The thought that people like to Twitter because they're afraid of dying occurred to me shortly after I read that Natasha Richardson, the actress, had died in a freakish skiing accident. A few days afterward, 18-year-old Jafari Williamson stepped off a train near Toronto and minutes later fell under it.
Sudden, random catastrophes, and the quick chill they produce at the breakfast table: It was Ms. Richardson's and Mr. Williamson's blithe ignorance of their own looming fates that was terrifying to think about.
Randomness is the hooligan we all fear. Unmerited suffering, the premature death of loved ones, physical disaster — these are the sources of what Julian Huxley, the famous evolutionary biologist, called "injustice at the hands of the cosmos." That cosmic injustice "represents the persistence of chance and its amorality in human life."
So — I thought — what's the standard answer to the awful fact that none of us knows how or when we'll die?
Carpe diem. Live for today, in the moment, while you can: This is it, it's not a rehearsal, today is the first day, etc.
And what is Twitter? Twitter is a communications technology, a form of mass instant messaging, that specializes in recording the details of life in the moment.
Over the box on their computers and phones where Twitterers type their tweets (their word, not mine) is always the same question, the Twitter dictum: "What are you doing?"
Twitterers answer that question in 140-character reports tossed into the Twittersphere. They cite thoughts and websites, music, moods, dreams, longings, fury, koans, regrets.
And why? Because, the Twitter website says, "eating a sandwich becomes a lot more interesting in the context of Twitter." What does that mean? It means this: Eating a sandwich becomes interesting, even important, if the action only has to occupy a moment of time. To be judged unimportant, a notion has to have pretensions to enduring value. A tweet doesn't last long enough for decay and judgment to set in.
A. J. Liebling said he was as good a writer as he knew, for someone who wrote as fast as he did. Twitter aspires to a similar standard. Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, once tweeted "Taking two Advil." He knows that details make stories. A reporter pointed out that he could have been slyly shilling for the manufacturer.
Mr. Dorsey replied that he just didn't want to spell "ibuprofen."
His career path could be a diagnosis for ADHD: He flitted from podcasting to mobile telephony to the taxi- and courier-dispatch software business before he hatched the idea for Twitter. These days he's tweeting from Spain, where he seems to be eating well.
The lure of Twitter is the lure of Right Now. There is no death in the moment of Right Now: There is only where/what/why/who I am. If you are tweeting or tweeted, you are not dead, yet.
That was my theory.
Or, as my wife said over breakfast when I asked her why people Twittered, "People are terrified of being invisible. They need to be seen." That's why there are six million Twitterers in North America now, six times as many as there were a year ago.
It was at this point that I had my next major brainwave (two a day is my limit): Would it be possible to discuss my theory — Twitterization and its discontents — on Twitter?
One problem: Twitter messages are 140 characters, tops. This sentence, for instance, is exactly 140 characters long, which you can see, ladies, isn't nearly enough space to essay much of a theory.
But the discipline of compression is part of Twitter's charm. Brevity and the management of candour are essential. One must, as Mark Twain advised, "eschew surplusage." Characters count down from 140 above the message window as you type. I imagined that each character costs a dime, and every time I brought my tweet down in size with a disciplined elision, I was saving money — good work, Brown, there's a financial crisis on! I felt like James Bond, with the nuclear device ticking down to zero. Strangely thrilling.
It's possible to write compelling prose in 140 characters. Writer Arjun Basu posts 140-character short stories on Twitter (he was profiled in The Globe and Mail this week); Ruth Reichl, the editor of Gourmet, and Susan Orlean, the New Yorker writer and author of The Orchid Thief, both Twitter elegantly. Someone pretending to be Christopher Walken — Twitter has several Walken imposters — posts tweets that are zen-like in their weird Walkenic enthusiasm and clarity:
If I controlled the auto industry, I would shift the emphasis back to full-sized sedans.
So we tried it. A conversation about death and Twittering was to take place at noon on Wednesday. I had typed the third sentence of my theory before the damn thing galloped away from me. It kept galloping for an hour and a half. People had a lot to say. It was more like tossing firecrackers than writing. By the end, 90 minutes later, nearly 16,000 readers had taken a gander at Twittering as an unconscious response to the fear of death. This is either a very good sign, or proof that the end is nigh.
It was exhausting, like climbing into a clothes dryer for a ride. Fifteen new tweets popped up every minute. Some of the Twitterers agreed: I tweet, therefore I am. Others demurred. There was a sub-conversation about tweets as epitaphs, as the archive of a life; another about what constitutes real intimacy.
And those were the highlights. Twitter lets everyone talk at once — much faster than Twitter's computers can react, if the conversation is of any size, which makes it impossible to control.
I suspect this is why a certain breed of writer and journalist — and most people over 45, only 11 per cent of whom use Twitter, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, are wary of tweeting.
Twitter is one more symptom of the culture war being fought right now between society's Engineers — smart, extroverted, optimistic people who believe technology can solve everything — and its Naturalists, equally smart people who tend to side with the private mind, in the sad, lonely beauty of its isolation.
Most Naturalists don't want to maintain control over the media or its message, as some Engineers and their marketing monkeys insist. But they do write to stay unavailable, to keep the world at bay until they have figured out what they think and what is true. There's nothing wrong with that methodology; it has produced the theory of evolution and Cézanne's paintings and the novel Lolita and Gandhi's political theories, to cite a few gems of quiet introspection.
But this is why it is reassuring to actually try Twittering. Because even a brief stroll through Twitterville proves Twittering won't replace long-form writing (much less online newspapers, as even Jack Dorsey admits).
Proof? The transcript of our Give-me-Twitter-or-give-me-death chatfest (the Twittered archive). It's indecipherable. It reads like the transcript of a radio show in which everyone shouts at once. Twittering is essentially radio in electronic print form, with links. The absence of a central filter is what makes Twittering so pleasant and energetic and optimistic in the moment, and what makes it chaotic afterward.
Twitter is already evolving, of course. Google is rumoured to be willing to pay $3-billion for it. (A lot of money for a company that had 25 employees in December.) Yammer, a competitor of Twitter, is trying to make its service pay (Twitter is free) by tweaking tweeting in a more professional direction: It asks not "What are you doing?" but "What are you working on?"
Even so, the average Twitter user is 31 (not a teenager), urban and almost certain to own a personal digital assistant. More than half read newspapers every day (albeit online, three-quarters of the time). That doesn't sound like the profile of a bunch of revolutionaries, or even a group to be afraid of.
Computers are replacing human beings in more and more venues in which public life was once enacted — at the bank, in meetings, at work, at the library, at the newsstand, dating, chatting. People need to replace lost face time somehow. Tweeting does that. It can't address the horror of dying, as someone noted during the dryer tumble. But it may ease our fear of dying alone.
Tags: twitter
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by debby on -
Twiter is bocoming popular world wide to send and receive SMS messages on Internet. It is becomming very useful nowadays.
Please donot demand death inplace of it. Some new techniques will be invented soon to make it more sophisticated and user friendly.You will have many options available in future instead of it sympathy words . . .
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