| Twitter Status: |
3 commentsThe millionth stupid thing written about Twitter
From a TechCrunch post about a novel ‘released on twitter’:
Who says 140 characters isn’t enough to say something constructive? Matt Stewart is writing an entire novel that way.
OK, where to begin.
First, I don’t think anyone said that 140 chars isn’t enough to say anything constructive, it’s just not enough to say most things constructive. Second, by “writing an entire novel that way”, they mean writing a novel the regular way, then using a script to chop it up into tweet-sized chunks and pipe it out in pieces to twitter. So really, you could have done this with any book. Also, you could have done this with any character-length restriction. It’s meaningless.
Some have written that twitter makes you a better writer by forcing you to be concise. I disagree. Twitter can make you a more concise writer, but that’s not synonymous with a better writer. If you wanted to be an even better writer, why not just restrict yourself to 100 characters? How about 80? I’m not arguing against the utility of the character limit, but I think its usefulness is for the readers, to allow for easy skimming.
3 comments
Matt – Matt Stewart here, the author of The French Revolution. Your post is so wildly inaccurate and devoid of context it’s made me question my otherwise rabid love for Google products and the scores of hyper-intelligent people who work there. I’m sad to see the internet conversation disintegrate into rubbish yet again.
Best,
Matt Stewart
I’m tired of Twitter. I don’t care if people want to use it, but can news organizations at least stop talking about it like it’s a cure for cancer? Seriously.
(replied to Matt via email, will follow up in a post later)
@Ted: yeah, that’s what’s getting to me. It seems like every time a news org wants to appear “with it”, they somehow just pull in twitter.. problem solved! I do like twitter, I just hate the hyperbole.
Leave a Comment