Why I'm Afraid of Twitter

In a January 1 New York Times editorial entitled "Why Twitter Will Endure", David Carr wrote,

"Some time soon, the company won’t say when, the 100-millionth person will have signed on to Twitter to follow and be followed by friends and strangers. That may sound like a MySpace waiting to happen — remember MySpace? — but I’m convinced Twitter is here to stay."

He backs up this bold statement with several articulate arguments:

1. It's a source of "incredibly vital, timely information... from really bright people in their respective fields".
2. It's a means by which we can glean succinct, pithy information in lieu of spouting-off, because of the 140-character confines and tools like the hashtag (which collects comments by topic).
3. It's a source of "algorithmic authority", in his words, "meaning that if all kinds of people are pointing at the same thing at the same instant, it must be a pretty big deal."

Okay. Fine. I cede those points. It's an effective, efficient mode of communication in an information-inundated technological climate. But in the milieu of writing, it is also a loss of voice. And what do writers have if they don't have their voice? Every writing instructor and magazine editor has imparted the fact that cutthroat editing, writing short and sweet, is a greater challenge than writing lengthily with eloquence. So I'm not implying that the Twitter platform is fundamentally opposed to strong writing. But the users, as a vast whole, are.

I support the use of social media products like Facebook and Twitter for just that- social media. But the threat of corrosion of quality news media and literary craft is undeniably due, in part, to the spreading-like-a-virus use of these communicative tools. Why painstakingly construct a well-reported and -composed piece of narrative writing to spark debate when an economical 140-character message blasted into the digital cosmos will accomplish the same? I'm not claiming that award-worthy writing is dead, or dying. I'm just worried that the overlap in usage- social and professional- in a creative product like Twitter is working toward a level medium in which we'll forget there was ever a difference between the two.

Perhaps the most worrisome: Carr wrote his editorial January 1, the first day of a new decade. A coincidence? Or is his message, then, harbinger of our publishing future?

Sign here

When I was in elementary school my family took a vacation to Orlando. At that age, Orlando was synonymous with Disney World. No matter the other attractions- Universal Studios, Parrot Jungle, our gorgeous hotel- Orland (really, Florida) meant the land of Disney. My parents bought me a puffy red rectangular autograph book and a chunky pen. Over the course of the week I filled each white page with a different character's signature: Mickey Mouse, Alice in Wonderland, Aladdin. I still have that book somewhere. And I still have that fascination with autographs.

I've touched before on the disappearance of practiced handwriting. One con I omitted was the depreciation of signatures. I've met celebrities before, but the only physical evidence I have of any of the encounters is a goggle-eyed picture with SNL's Maya Rudolph. In high school I had the Broadway cast of Rent sign my Playbill, and I have plenty of signatures of people I consider superstars (my high school drums teacher and Tina Turner's former drummer; preeminent Penn professors), but none eBay-worthy. Nonetheless I agree with Rhys Tranter on A Piece of Monologue literary blog:

"Writers' signatures hold a particular grip on me, not least for the romantic idea that they bring us closer to the personality of the writers themselves. If we feel close to an author's work, there are times when the printed word can feel like a barrier between us and the original manuscript. A signature offers a stamp of the writer's character and humanity; and in this sense, a signed book can feel like a personal validation of the work."

In our Google culture- it was named the word of the year by the American Dialect Society- authors need not rely on the pen for any writing, let alone their signature. Mobile book authoring, including writing, editing, and publishing on the go, is becoming a commonality more than an innovation. At my office, the publishers have all adopted electronic signatures to authenticate contracts and other financial documents.

Reliance on electronic writing has its obvious downsides: imperfect spell-check, for example, or "spell-Czech" as Wordnik titles its hilarious list of word processor spelling errors. But what about the downside, really the tragedy, of losing the magic of a favorite author's autograph? It may seem hard to fathom that snaking-out-the-door bookstore lines filled with neck-craning fans will ever become an anachronism. But isn't that what we once thought about cellphones, and laptops, and portable MP3 players? I would never have thought, as a fifth grader with tongue poked out, painstakingly forming my cursive letters on blue dotted lines, that by the time I was an official member of the adult workplace the most handwriting I would need would be to jot Post-It reminders for myself and occasionally address an envelope.

I don't want to relinquish the power of authors' signatures to the past. Like Tranter writes, they sparkle with the connection they forge between you and the signer, like no celebrity's Twitter feed can do. This is one area of the old/new publishing divide in which I'm not willing to compromise.

Slow and steady wins the race

While I was home in Maryland, my three younger cousins gigglingly shared with me a YouTube clip of MADTV's Anjelah Johnson parodying a Vietnamese manicurist, and one of Anjelah as "Bon Qui Qui", a cheeky King Burger cashier. They showed me a free cell phone ring website packed with sound clips ranging from bizarre to hilarious, and Facebook photo after Facebook photo.

Rewind to when I was a preteen: I was just registering for an AOL account, to the then-ubiquitous, now-farcical greeting of "You've Got Mail". Email, and IM, were phenomena- I remember sitting cemented to my computer chair emailing short messages back and forth with my friend real-time, before I had downloaded AIM, unaware that even more instantaneous communication was possible.

My cousins and their peers are growing up with technology a given. There's even a name for them, cited by Schott's vocab blog: Generation XD. They've never known Internet-less life. A great majority has cell phones, not to mention YouTube accounts, X-boxes, and robotic toys like the Zhu Zhu hamsters (what happened to American Girl dolls and Beanie Babies?) Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, sums up my at-a-loss sentiment: “People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology."

But even people in their 20's, my fellow Millennials, have sewn tech into the seams of our lives. A Salon article cites The Harris Poll's finding that "Americans 18 and older spent an average of 13 hours a week online, excluding time spent checking e-mail.... -- nearly double the time spent online a decade ago. [And] people from ages 25 to 49 spent the most amount of time on the Internet (17-18 hours a week)."

So, the question is: when will we reach the point of saturation? When will the ever-quickening pace of digitization throw us off the tracks? In simpler terms, Jocelyn Noveck asks on Salon, "When is one more gadget just too many?"

In the face of innovations like Apple's iPad and its many mobile predecessors, some writers like Trevor Butterworth of Forbes have called for a "Slow-Word Movement," after the fashion of Carlo Petrini's "Slow Food Movement." Both call for counteracting the "relentless, endless free diet" of either fast media, or fast food. We should be savoring, sustaining, taking pleasure in the media we consume, much as we should be doing with high-quality, healthy, lip-smacking food. Butterworth hails Dave Eggers as the movement's pioneer, given Eggers' San Francisco Panorama newspaper, a stunning full-color print publication furnished with original feature contributions from headliners like Michael Chabon and Stephen King, traditional "hard-hitting" investigative reporting, and a 96-page books section, those two lattermost quickly becoming journalistic relics. Eggers' work reinflates quashed hopes of surival for literary publications like The Virginia Quarterly Review and New England Review. A Mother Jones article on "The Death of Fiction" cites the "tailspin" of the novelists' and short story writers' market, declaring magazines like the above to be on their death beds.

Another Slow Media Movement, as The Boston Globe's Brainiac blog calls it, paragon is the independent Mark Batty Publisher, dedicated to the art of crafting books, and to the gratifying experience of holding and admiring a book as a physical object.

I agree with Butterworth: we've traded aesthetics for abundance. We've prioritized rapidity of ingestion over quality of content. I think the ability to glance through news bytes or scan 140-character Tweets is valuable; we can't apply the slow-and-steady approach to all media. But we can return to the artisanal at least in part. We'll save money, save the time invested in setting up and growing familiar with using a new device, and (help) save the publishing industry.

Each of the 250+ medical journals published by the company I work for contains painstakingly researched, written, reviewed and assembled articles. The journals' websites aim to deliver efficient and user-friendly content to the physicians and students who log on, but never at the sacrifice of quality.

To quote again the Salon article: are we at "a cultural tipping point, a sense of general gadget overload"? In my case, my budget and my love of the literary and artistic say yes. In others'? Whether the iPad is successful or not may be indicative.

Dictatorship, Dictatory, Diction, Dictionary

In the dark night’s insomnia, the book is a stimulating sedative, awakening my tired imagination to the hypnagogic trance of language. Retiring to the canopy of the bedroom, turning on the bedside light, taking the big dictionary to bed, clutching the unabridged bulk, heavy with the weight of all the meanings between these covers, smoothing the thin sheets, thick with accented syllables–all are exercises in the conscious regimen of dreamers, who toss words on their tongues while turning illuminated pages.


-Harryette Mullen, "Sleeping with the Dictionary"

In elementary school I had a paperback Bugs Bunny dictionary, pages well-thumbed to butter-softness, print large like in the books in the eye doctor's waiting room.


In middle school I had a thin Random House Webster's Student Notebook Dictionary, pages made of newsprint, three-hole-punched to fit into the front of my big plastic binder.

In high school I relied on the doorstop Merriam-Webster my family kept on the bottommost row of a living room bookshelf. It was a big block of a thing with miniscule print. Its weight conveyed its dependability.

I didn't pack a dictionary when I moved to college. I don't know when exactly I started relying solely on the Internet to look up definitions, pronunciations, etymologies, translations. But since then my book collection and my desk have been devoid of a print dictionary, and I can't say I feel the loss. A friend recently told me she and her roommates keep one on their coffee table- like a book of photographs, or a magazine, or a vase of flowers.


I have Dictionary.com set as one of my search providers on both my work and home computers, and I use it frequently. I may not be able to "clutch the unabridged bulk, heavy with the weight of all the meanings", but I'd ask Harryette Mullen: can you discover the origins of whole phrases? Can you hear a pronunciation aloud, in a pleasant British voice, no less? Can you translate to and from over 40 languages?

Online dictionaries enable users to scroll through words in alphabetical order, just as I can flip through the pages of my family's hardback tome. So they afford the same basic usage, but treat this function as a platform off of which to spring into linguistic riches. Should a physical dictionary hold sentimental value, I would of course support its owner's endorsement. And, as always, I can relate to the comfort of holding a book in your hands, feeling confident in your mastery over it because of the physicality of the possession. There's no intimidation, no overwhelming sense of the illimitable reaches, because you can confirm at a physical level what the book contains. Sometimes when you sit with hand hovering over mouse, eyes flitting like fireflies over your computer screen, it can feel like you're at the lip of the Grand Canyon. Yet from an informational standpoint I think online dictionaries are a paragon of how technology can revolutionize the written materials in our lives.

Maybe, too, they're not just well-suited to Cyberland, but somehow intended for it, in its synergistic capacity?

Fact-checking for magazines sometimes includes verifying accurate word usage. I quickly learned during one of my editorial internships that "m-w.com" is shorthand for Merriam Webster's site. I used to then find myself wondering just how, exactly, the process of sanctioning new dictionary entries works. The question is particularly relevant in light of the 2009 crowning of the New Oxford American Dictionary's "word of the year" (ancient news, but worth mentioning). And here are some even more ancient neologisms.

Oxford University Press, publisher of the preeminent OED in addition to the New Oxford American, apparently implements an expansive project called the Reading Programme whose research team constantly examines printed materials for word lightbulbs (either new terms or new usages of terms). The general public, too, submits thousands of suggestions to the dictionary. The OED’s original editor James Murray during his tenure published an “Appeal to the English-Speaking and English-Reading Public of Great Britain, America and the British Colonies” in an effort to cast forth his nets and receive word of… well, words. Of course, the Oxford wordworms prioritize longevity of each suggested coinage to ensure its lasting absorption into the English language. Credible, and manifold, sources are other obvious gauges of OED-worthiness.

In all, then, the process seems simple. More of an art form than a science, which is logical. Perhaps this sense of universal teamwork, an ongoing and impartial project to collectively enhance the completeness of our language, is just as edifying as the final product itself. And, further, aren't collaboration, connection, global engagement the calling cards of the Internet? It's called the World Wide Web for a reason.

I say keep your great uncle Roy's handbound, gold-embossed dictionary, and cherish it. But also celebrate this rare uncontroversial concession to the digital remodeling of print.