Twitter Archive

April 16, 2012 by Leave a Comment

I wanted to respond to a topic brought up in in V’s post “Twitter as a Primary Source,” specifically the portion that cited this article from the Library of Congress. It is concerning to think that there is such a thing as a “Twitter Archive” and that tweets are being preserved for future generations to see the mundane updates of our day-to-day lives. The Library of Congress article argues “Twitter will be one of the most informative resources available on modern day culture, including economic, social and political trends, as well as consumer behavior and social trends.” Twitter, with its addition to the ranks of the material in the Library of Congress, can be viewed as an electronic nonfiction source. Everything we tweet will be saved forever and will be later used in anthropological studies in order to analyze and classify our generation. V made a valid point by advising “before you tweet make sure it’s something you’re willing to have go down in history bearing your name,” however there are other concerns to take into consideration.

Possibly one of the reasons Twitter is so popular is that it is used by so many celebrities. Twitter users can follow their favorite movie stars and musicians the same way they follow people they actually know. These fans rest assured that these accounts are legitimate because celebrity pages are adorned with a validating blue check mark. What concerns me is that possibly that all the tweets from these certified accounts will forever be preserved in the Twitter Archive as autobiographical statements from these users. How can we be sure that the celebrities are even the ones tweeting? It is equally likely there is some Public Relations person or personal assistant working for the celebrity and posting updates for him or her in order to maintain good relations with his or her fan base.

I’m not bringing up this point to complain about celebrity authenticity but to draw attention to the fact that these 140 characters posts will forever be saved as primary sources from the respective individuals. Reference texts require citation in order to ensure their historical accuracy. I think these same standards should be held for any work of nonfiction. I’m not saying Twitter needs to using citations, I just think if it is going to be included in the Library of Congress it shouldn’t be classified as a primary source and it definitely should not be viewed as “one of the most informative resources.”

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Twitter as a Primary Source

March 29, 2012 by 1 Comment

Recently in my Anthropology course we’ve been talking about inequality in society, and gradually the conversation progressed to racial inequality. My professor often points to history to explain the origins of said inequalities and slavery often enters the discussion. Humans have a fair amount of experience in enslaving one another as a result of racial prejudice or conquest or what have you. However, today my professor showed us a more recent article to demonstrate that these injuries are perhaps buried deeper in a more modern age, but far from gone. I am of course talking about the reactions of many Hunger Games fans in response to casting decisions for the movie. If you haven’t read one of the articles about this, check it out.

The article describes essentially how many fans had a very different mental conception of certain characters, despite having textual evidence to the contrary, and how the race of these characters affected the way they were perceived. Where did Jezebel find some of these reactions? Twitter. The tweets range from mild shock: “after watching the hunger games preview 6 times in a row, i realized Rue is black. whaaaat?! #shocked” all the way to “Kk call me racist but when I found out rue was black her death wasn’t as sad #ihatemyself“. Despite the societal implications this has, I’m more concerned about the medium these people used to express themselves.

Twitter as of April 2010 has begun donating all public tweets to the Library of Congress, and you can check out that article here. This is and will be such an immensely rich database of the past, first and foremost because of the number of different perspectives it offers. For instance, Twitter played a large role in the recent Egyptian unrest as well as Iran’s election protests. These tweets will hopefully allow a fuller and more complete perspective on historical events as opposed to the limited and often biased versions we have now. The article also mentions that “Twitter will be one of the most informative resources available on modern day culture, including economic, social and political trends, as well as consumer behavior and social trends.”

It’s tough to keep track of one’s digital footprint in the current state of things, but before you tweet make sure it’s something you’re willing to have go down in history bearing your name.

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Thinking outside the box

February 23, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Everytime I sit down to work on something in Inform7, I get this image of myself at my own pannel at ComicCon, answering questions from ravenous fans about my amazing game, “Faction 11″.

I’m using Inform to explore the world of a story I orignially had in mind for a novel. I’ve never written science fiction before, and I needed all of the resources I could get my hands on to try and flesh out my new universe. I’m using Inform to explore the world I’ve created, and using the map function to get a graphic idea of where things are located physically. It’s working kind of brilliantly.

The map function is magnificent in its own right, because I find this method of mapping to be the easiest when planning an Inform story. Plus, it gives me a list of objects in each room, so I can make sure everything is where its supposed to be.

After coding the game, I love getting a chance to play it. The coding and the playing allow me to explore character actions and plot points I may not have thought of before. This method of brainstorming for a story gives me the chance to see what details are necessary when telling a story, expecially when foreshadowing. If I know that a code is needed to enter a room, I know I have to plant the code in the world at some point beforehand, where I know the player will be able to find it. This same logic transfers nicely when I’m writing the story in traditional form, because I get a sense of when I should reveal certain information to the reader. I pretty much love everything about working with Inform.

I plan on creating a game, a hypertext story, and perhaps another electronic medium (twitterature?!) to explore every facet of “Faction 11″. Not only is elit a marvelous tool to use when writing t

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Twitterature

February 23, 2012 by 3 Comments

This is the story of my life: First, I conceive a brilliant concept. Then I proceed to Google this concept only to find that it already exists. And the cycle repeats. Case in point: today I had an epiphany when I put together my two favorite words to form “Twitterature”. It was going to be groundbreaking. The ideas flooded into my head and I broke out the pen and paper to make sure they were remembered. “I might even be a millionaire,” I thought. I realized I was getting ahead of myself, and that before I went any further I wanted to make sure this concept was truly original. I rushed to Google and began to type “twittera” in the search bar. The dropdown suggestions appeared and there, sitting at the very top of the list staring back at me, was my beloved term “twitterature”. I was heartbroken. I hesitatingly clicked on what I had thought was my first million-dollar idea in order to find out what it already was. First I will describe my concept to you, and then I will have to break the awful news of what “Twitterature” really is.

When I thought I had coined the term “twitterature”, I was immediately overwhelmed with ideas of how this could change literature as we know it. I dreamed of the greatest works of literature all boiled down to 140 characters of hermeneutical genius. I imagined the philosophically heavy works of Plato, or the ambiguous intricacy of Pound’s Cantos, placed into 140-character tweets. I am talking about the entirety of the Lord of the Rings trilogy summed up in one, thick, immaculately-worded tweet dripping with semantic significance. Word usage would be at a premium. There would be no room for unnecessary words that did not convey deep meaning regarding the work at hand; no room for hashtags, “@” symbols, or overtly cliché acronyms such as “YOLO”. Only enough room for expertly placed words, letters, numbers or symbols to encompass the entirety of a classic work of literature. The greatest authors in the world would get on board sending their twitterature to me, and it would be compiled in a brilliant book that would fly off the shelves of Borders Amazon.com.  Sparknotes would go bankrupt. Perhaps some authors would even attempt to make twitterature of their own works, which would indeed be the best form of twitterature. Thinking of examples of books that would be extremely interesting as twitterature, I texted my pastor and asked him to twitterize the entire message of the Bible (in 140 characters of course). He responded within three minutes with 137 carefully chosen characters: “The Bible is about God’s commitment to redeem a sinful people for Himself through His Holy Spirit and his Son’s cradle, cross, and crown.”—Joe Holland. That was a great example: the entirety of the meta-narrative in the palm of your hand. Twitterature was going to work! This was my brainchild and I was holding it in my arms smiling at it. Then…I discovered what twitterature already was.

 

Twitterature as it already exists is a disgrace. Here’s how I would describe their work in 140 characters or less: cheesy, un-classy, mildly funny, but often blatantly vulgar and distasteful tweets disgracing an originally beautiful work of literature (137 characters). Don’t take it from me though. Here’s one of the tweets in the retelling of Hamlet: “I just killed my girlfriend’s dad. Does this mean I can’t hit that?” And yet another sad example, this time from Harry Potter:  “I AM UNDERGOING A LOT OF ANGST RIGHT NOW. And this Asian girl is giving me a major hard-on. Blue balls suck. No magic potion for it either.”

Twitterature is a published book for sale on Amazon, very close to my idea, but yet so far. Instead of using one magnificent tweet to sum up the entirety of a work of literature they do it in “20 tweets or fewer”. Virtually every tweet is extremely sexual and offensive, but that is not what bothers me. What irks me is the lack of ingenuity. There is but a splinter of creativity to be found throughout all of the examples given on their website. This all made sense when I clicked on the “authors” tab to find out that both of the authors are nineteen year old college bro’s from the University of Chicago.  What could have been a brilliant work of art was diminished to F-bombs and penis jokes. Thus is life.

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