Like many people my age and in the world, I am active on social media. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, the works. If you asked me, and I know you would, I’d tell you that my favorite of all the social media platforms is Twitter. You can catch me @danielleaturtle, with my reining popular tweet standing at 24 likes.

 

 

 

 

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Hilarious. Iconic. A legend among us.

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But really, Twitter is fascinating. Twitter is so much more than just a platform for memes and jokes—although it is definitely that, and I love it. Twitter has established new ways to present literature and narratives. On Twitter, language has adapted to mimic spoken word and where users have developed a way to convey tone and body language. Twitter is an intersectional space where writers, scholars, artists, etc, who are not traditionally found in mainstream academia or culture elevate their voices and their work.

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As someone in the generation inundated with digital content, I’ve found myself frequently explaining, and defending, the role of social media in my life. For example: I’ve been met, occasionally, with surprise when I tell people that I often get my news from Twitter. But is it that surprising that it’s a useful resource? I follow the New York Times, CNN, PBS NewsHour, and more; when I get breaking news, I can go on Twitter and see headlines from many different sources lined up next to each other. Given the character constraint, I can get a quick overview of what’s happening. If I want more, I can click through to the article from any source. I can compare what information each source has and how they’re sharing it. An adult once walked by me and mumbled something about “you kids always on your phones”—I kid you not—while I was reading an article from the Wall Street Journal! I am not even saying this to be pretentious; I’m indignant. The audacity.

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I. Twitter and literature

I recently saw a tweet by the wonderful @jonnysun—author, illustrator, Twitter extraordinaire, etc—that made me question the role of Twitter. The Tweet is as follows:

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So, obviously, this blew my mind. Not initially, but as I thought about it, it made me think. Is Twitter...reading? I’d just figured that my time on Twitter was mindless, even as I was aware that I was reading things that were important and meaningful and no less so because they were constrained to 140 characters. It wasn’t like this knowledge was something that would fundamentally impact my life, but it made me think about Twitter in a new way, a way that might make it easier to convince other people that my time spent on Twitter was, in some way, productive.  

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This tweet sent me down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out what Twitter is. Or, rather, what the act of checking in on Twitter is. So we could assume that Twitter is not reading because reading requires intent. You better believe that my Twitter reading is intentional—I am intentionally not doing other stuff I’m supposed to be doing. Ha. But really, this idea is complicated by the way writers and creatives have been using Twitter in increasingly inventive and intentional ways.

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Twitter has become its own platform for writing. I’m not sure when exactly this started, when writers started crafting narratives with the intent of publishing them on Twitter, but I at least know that it happened in 2012. Starting on Thursday, May 24, @NYerFiction, the New Yorker’s fiction Twitter, tweeted out a short story, entitled Black Blox, by author Jennifer Egan. A new line from the story was sent as a tweet each minute between 8pm and 9pm every night for ten consecutive nights. An article on a New York Times blog described how Egan wrote the story specifically for publication on Twitter. She was fascinated by the serialization of the story, which takes the form of “a running scroll of a spy keeping a log of her current mission.”

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Isn’t that wild? She wrote this story, plugging in lines to Twitter to make sure they’d fit the 140 character limit. (The character limit has since increased to 280). She used Twitter and its constraints as a new medium for telling a story, and by doing this, crafted a story in a way that was innovative and original while harkening back to the days of serialized stories. Read outside Twitter, it’s still interesting, but it feels a little out of place, as things tend to do when you take them from their native format.

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Another writer has been using Twitter in a similar way, though his innovation demonstrates how Twitter can be used for narrative storytelling. He updates his story sporadically so it feels less intentionally serialized and more like an on-the-fly kind of story, which I feel is part of its allure. On August 7, 2017, @moby_dickhead, a former writer for Buzzfeed and an illustrator,  began telling a tale of the child haunting his apartment. The story has since been named “Dear David” and we have not gotten closure. I’m going to recommend you read the whole thing (even though it will take a long time and it might torment you in your dreams), but if you don’t want to, I’ll give you a quick rundown. Adam’s apartment is being haunted by the ghost of a dead kid. A lot of spooky stuff started happening. He captured some pictures of David, which, okay, I know everyone and their brother can work their way around Photoshop, but these pictures are creepy. Even as I’m writing this piece about how cool it is that artists are using Twitter creatively, I’m getting a little goosebumpy. That’s how powerful this method of storytelling is!

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Adam’s additions to the story don’t seem to be on any kind of time schedule; much like we imagine a haunting might happen, he tweets updates as they “occur”. Now, listen—I don’t know how you feel about ghosts. I don’t know how I feel about ghosts. But I do know that this story is really well done. Because the story is shared on Twitter, it feels personal; when I found the “Dear David” story, it was like a friend telling me their personal scary story. By being unpredictable with his updates, by posting stream of consciousness type threads of tweets that make it seem like he really is just giving us the details as he works through them himself, he has crafted an engaging and compelling narrative. I don’t believe this story is true, but I’m also not going to tell you that I’m not scared. I want to keep coming back, just to make sure he hasn’t been possessed, even though I know he’s just effectively using this medium for the purpose of narrative storytelling.

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I’m in a book co-op, and we used the “Dear David” story as one of our readings. Because Twitter is reading! Before the @jonnysun tweet, I didn’t think about “Dear David” like I thought about reading a short story. But that’s what it is. Twitter is a platform, its own medium, an innovative tool. I love it. And these are just a few examples! Author Teju Cole wrote a short story and shared it on Twitter without sending any tweets himself; he asked friends and followers to tweet out specific lines and then put his story together through retweets. Poet Joseph Delgado uses Twitter sometimes just as Twitter but also often utilizes it to share his poetry. Sometimes they are spaced out and take full advantage of the character count; sometimes they are just one line.

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II. internet language

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Another very interesting change has come with this innovative platform; internet users have basically created our own new form of English. People, largely in my generation and the younger ones, employ technically incorrect usages of punctuation, capitalization, and misspellings to communicate tone, inflection, etc. While the internet language is something that I knew of, because I participated, I didn’t realize how cool it really was until I saw a tweet sharing this post:

 

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By following the thread of this tweet, I found that similar things are happening in other languages; it’s not clear if they’re influencing each other or if this crazy internet language thing is just happening simultaneously across cultures. I also found a woman who is writing a book on this very phenomenon. Gretchen McCulloch, writer of the book on internet language for Penguin Books, has a blog and cohosts a podcast called Lingthusiasm. Now, this internet language is another example of something that’s pretty exclusive to to Twitter (and maybe Tumblr, but we don’t talk about that here) and is alienating/confusing/just plain not funny to people who aren’t on social media regularly. It’s not something that’s easily explained, because, for the most part, it’s not something that people learn; it’s just something they adapt to. But not being familiar with it doesn’t mean there’s no way it’s interesting; it really is! It’s super cool! How wild is it that an enormous group of people with different dialects and slang usages came together to use the written word to establish a new way of online speaking that could communicate sarcasm, excitement, a joking tone, and more?

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Take a few examples: in this article, McCulloch writes about the meaning of exclamation marks between words, a punctuation trend I’m currently very fond of. Basically, using exclamation points between words is like shaking your listener so you really get your message across. It’s my current favorite rage-punctuation; it is just so!! effective!! She uses another article to explain the world smol, which just means small but also cute....or sometimes just cute and not even small. It’s pretty fluid. Like the earlier post noted, you might commonly find people on the internet capitalizing words seemingly unnecessarily to make A Point. You might see this capitalization surrounded by otherwise minimalist capitalization and sentences with very little punctuation. Sentences are rarely ended with a period—a simple period generally communicates curtness. Instead, sentences just don’t end. They’re separated by a space or are sent as separate messages to mimic the tone of regular speaking. You might see a key smash, something that looks a little like this: asdofjhfs. This is iconic; it generally conveys that the writer has so much emotion that they couldn’t even handle typing out full words. The overwhelming emotion might be excitement, or confusion, or nervousness. When you see a keyboard smash, you might imagine someone flailing—and, crazily enough, just using a jumbled mess of letters communicates what body language would otherwise.

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You’ve been introduced already to one of my favorite Twitter users, @jonnysun. He uses internet language in a fascinating way, and he translated it to the Real World. Jonny Sun wrote a book called everyone’s a aliebn when ur a aliebn too. (None of those words are typos.) For the past few years on Twitter, Sun cultivated a personality that was often known for using deliberate internet talk; he would substitute letters, misspell words, use abbreviations. He then wrote a book using this same form of language, written from the perspective of a smol aliebn named Jomny visiting earth for the first time and learning about humans. Sun wrote and illustrated the sort of graphic novel that is sort of for adults but also for everyone. Though his misspellings may come across as somewhat haphazard, he shared in an interview that there are a specific set of rules for the internet-inspired aliebn speak, enough rules that he created a style guide for his editor.

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He also worked to create a language that was intentionally and distinguishably his own. Though it draws from the conventions of internet talk, it is still unique. As the child of Chinese immigrants, he was sensitive to language and grammar. Being able to break the rules of a language effectively signals having a deep understanding of the language and fluency within it. Knowing this, he has been careful to craft his voice in such a way that it doesn’t play on any tropes of using ESL speakers as the punchline of jokes; he intentionally avoids any kind of misuse that might seem to suggest a play on how nonnative speakers would incorrectly use the language. He wanted the voice to be different in a way that creates a community and avoids any potential of people laughing at each other.

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III. intersectionality

 

Twitter has become an important space for people who might not find themselves in traditional academic spheres; that is, people of color, women, those in the LGBTQ+ community, and all intersecting identities. Those whose perspectives are often left out of mainstream scholarly work have used Twitter to elevate their voices and communicate with each other and with followers. Twitter, while not always the safest place, is at least a space where people don’t have to convince a homogenous panel that their perspective is worth acknowledging and representing, they don’t have to wait to be invited to a table that has little to no interest in considering what it means to write for an audience who is not primarily white. They can let their thoughts and work speak for itself as they amass followers and engage critically with scholarly work.

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Author Teju Cole discusses the importance of Twitter for his own work and for accessibility to readers, saying, "A lot of the people I want to be read by, a lot of the people I want to speak to, are not people who have subscriptions to The New Yorker or The New York Times, so it's important for me to speak to them in this way also." Kima Jones, a poet, saw the impact of this accessibility in action. She used Twitter to crowdsource a poem about race and culture; she compiled the responses from the community and turned it into a piece of art. In what other space could this happen? Where else would see a poet, a poet of color, call on a group of people to contribute and end up with a wholly original poem? Where else would you see a story crafted of retweets, or a queer poet finding a way to use character limits to still craft beautiful works.

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I’m not saying Twitter is magic, but...

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But it’s not. Twitter is a tool that has allowed people to use it and to meld it to revolutionize the way we look at literature, the way we look at poetry, the way we look at our favorite artists and at each other. It has allowed us to be close to writers whose work might otherwise have been held just out of our reach by a subscription requirement; it allows us to join in the conversation, for better or for worse. And with anything that allows such freedom, you will find trolls. You will find cruelty and the unsettling inhumanity that comes with anonymity. But you will also find art, niche humor, and thoughtful dialogues.

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With tweets being limited to 280 characters, there is not a lot of room in a single tweet for extensive explanations or deep conversation. Lucky for us, threads exist! Threads are, among other things, a space where writers can expand on criticism or share ideas. I have found threads to be especially interesting and useful in learning about issues from the perspectives of those who aren’t as loudly broadcasted by mainstream news.

 

A writer I follow, @eveewing, offers a lot of great insight and challenges to current events. She recently posted a thread detailing why traditional gun control rhetoric isn’t helpful for communities like those in the poorer areas of Chicago, which are predominantly populated by people of color. In a series of 17 tweets, which ends up being much shorter than the average opinion article, she offered crucial insight regarding why the mainstream gun control conversation isn’t a one size fits all solution. In another series of tweets, she tackles cultural appropriation and dismantles common conversations that try to downplay the severity of the issue. She does this all while she’s waiting at a salon. This is the other beautiful thing about Twitter, though it sometimes leads to a tweeter’s downfall—when you think of something, you can tweet it. When you read something, hear something, are writing something, whenever you have a reaction or want to ask a question or start a conversation, Twitter is there. She spoke concisely and eloquently about the troubles of cultural appropriation over the course of 30 minutes while she was sitting at a salon.

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Recently, businesswoman and writer @aminatou found that she had been quoted inaccurately and without real notice by a white woman in a book called The Opposite of Hate. Aminatou Sow used Twitter to explain the situation. She told her followers what had happened, and how the truth diverged from the account the author Sally Kohns had shared. After hearing Sow’s story, another writer, Ijeoma Oluo, reached out to share a similar occurrence. Oluo’s tweets had been quoted severely out of context. Using Twitter gave the two writers access to a large community of people. They were able to share their side of the story, unedited. Their story found its way into mainstream news after many writers voiced their support.

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Many artists, scholars, and writers, particularly who are people of color or who identify in the LGBTQ+ community or who are any number of intersecting identities, use Twitter to reach followers they might not reach otherwise, to build community, to share their work and thoughts. They don’t have to be invited to share, and they don’t have to dilute their opinions for the sake of catering to a mainstream audience. In this way, Twitter is an intersectional space. Creative people, working people, can build community; they can connect with others, and network, and promote the work that they do.

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In the midst of memes and jokes, we can scroll through Twitter and see profound conversation. We can support the work of people we might not had known about otherwise. We can read threads and think critically about the issues facing our countries, our identities, and consider what they look like from another perspective. We can do a lot with 280 characters.