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?

Here's blooking at you, kid

Yesterday's Paper Cuts post on Nobel-laureate Portuguese writer José Saramago's blog-turned-book poses an interesting question: can blogs become literature? Saramago's collection of blog posts, entitled "The Notebook", renders his online journal entries as essays. Yet in his review Gregory Cowles deems the vignettes "too topical and too fleeting to count as literature", albeit smartly and compellingly composed. For Cowles there is a marked difference between writing done in an Internet framework, and more traditional composition. Apparently Saramago agrees, because as Cowles notes, the author's last post reads,

“Until another day? I sincerely think not. I have begun another book and wish to dedicate all my time to it. You will see why, if it all goes well.”

I have to say I disagree with both men.

Saramagos' litblogging effort has antecedents; according to Wikipedia, "blooks" have existed for a number of years, a trend with enough traction to institute the Lulu Blooker Prize in 2005. Tucker Max, famed chronicler of drunken encounters, published New York Times bestseller I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell in 2006, writing in a genre he calls "fratire". The book based on Julie Powell's cooking blog "The Julie/Julia Project" was made into the film Julie & Julia in 2009. Colby Buzzell, a U.S. Army machine-gunner who spent a year in Iraq, turned his 2004 blog into a captivating and acclaimed memoir, My War: Killing Time in Iraq.

The breadth of these examples suggests the wide range of possibilities for transforming blogs into respectable- or, at least, commercially successful- prose. A Business Week article titled "'Blooks' are in Bloom" quotes Eileen Gittins, CEO of online publisher Blurb.com,

"We believe there's a market [for book-publishing services] for every single blogger out there. Charles Dickens originally serialized his novels in magazines. We are seeing much the same thing happening today, with blogs."

The blogosphere is rife with well-written material, and writers that prioritize literary craft. The tempest of new media is all about breaking down walls, between interface and user, writer and reader, professional and layman, traditional publishing and cutting-edge; why can't we discard the boundary, too, between blogging and "real" writing? I'll concede that the extension of electronic writing into the formalized publishing realm has its limits: 19-year-old U Chicago undergrads Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin's recent book Twitterature, a compilation of reimagined classic works in 20-character-tweet form, makes me gag (the Huffington Post writes that it "kicked all that is sacred about the written word in its proverbial scrotum"). But Twitter, like the blogosphere, does house the literary-minded among the rabble. An informal GalleyCat poll at the end of last year found "1,790 novelists, 9,139 poets, 19,490 journalists, 28,529 authors, and a staggering 99,082 writers on Twitter."

Basically I respect the fact that Saramago and Cowles are pigeonholing blogging and publishable writing, because I share readers' and authors' fear that cultivated writing will perish without its own limelight. But I also think there's room for blogs- earnest, finely written, ones especially- to evolve off the screen in their own right, not as a replacement for traditional books. So, I'd answer Saramago's ultimate question, "Until another day?" with a frank "Yes."

Journalist: What's in a Name?

"Repeat after me:
Short is better than long.
Simple is good.
Long Latin nouns are the enemy.
Anglo-Saxon active verbs are your best friend.
One thought per sentence."

Such were William Zinsser's words on August 11, 2009 to the incoming international students at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. His talk centered on the technology era's diminishment of the sense of journalistic writing as craft. The overarching question he posed was why, in a digital age, should reporters be concerned with the art of writing when the focus is on the electronic: quick, mobile-friendly blog entries accompanied by video clips, podcasts, high resolution images. His answer:

"You’ll be making and editing videos and photographs and audio recordings to accompany your articles. Somebody—that’s you—will still have to write [my emphasis] all those video scripts and audio scripts."

In my journalism classes at Penn, professors touched on the importance of gaining familiarity with new media, in that if modern news writers don't stay abreast of the direction the field is taking, they have no hope of success. But they never suggested that journalists sacrifice the quality of their craft for the sake of satisfying digital trends. At my two magazine jobs, editors encouraged us to hone our writing skills even while it was important to compose succinct pieces befitting blog posts or newsletter blasts.

But when Wikipedia serves as a legitimate source for The New York Times, the vocabulary of printmaking is steadily dissolving into obsoleteness, elimination of copy editors' from publications' staff lessens the sense of professionalism (The Baltimore Sun's front page subhead on January 21, 2010: "Rawlings-Blake says her bill will seek to heighte public trus' "), cellphone novelists are scoring book deals, and LG has unveiled a bendable eBook Reader as a newspaper replacement, the message bull-horned to budding journalists is that eschewal of honed writing is acceptable in favor of catering to the format of modern media.

I realize that there is a vast audience for poorly written yet informationally rich writing, even sometimes including me. For example, my daily Slate e-newsletter often has typos but still provides a succinct global news roundup. In general, however, enviably fine writing such as in Vanity Fair, New York Magazine, The Guardian, and lit blog The Millions, can communicate the same valuable information but infinitely more palatably. The only difference between career journalists and citizen journalists is this allegiance to the art of writing; flagging in such integrity makes titling oneself a professional journalist meaningless.

I haven't settled on a writing path but I have always been drawn to the article form; so the debate over the metamorphosis of journalism has personal relevance. I understand the need to mold writing to the requisites of modern publishing. But I also will stubbornly defend the now-old-line mentality of journalists like Zinsser, my writing professors and former magazine editors. Superior writing is never outmoded.

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.

The white perimeter

From "Marginalia" by Billy Collins:

"We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge."

I'm going to avoid the term "neat freak". Also "OCD" and "anal retentive". But I like things neat. My files at work, both print and electronic, are organized into sub-sub-categories, and my apartment is always uncluttered. My mom got me in the habit at a young age of making my bed every morning, and that fastidiousness grew to translate into every other corner of my life.

I've gotten better. These days a little jumble adds welcome color. My bedroom desk is besprinkled with Post-its, an odd paper clip and stray flyers or tickets, and well-thumbed magazines are drunkenly accordioned on my coffee table. Gone are the days of the rainbow-coordinated sock drawer and the oh-so-ginger transportation of books to avoid creases or crumpling. I remember when a classmate doodled on my empty notebook page in middle school before the teacher started class, I flipped to a fresh sheet when the time came to take notes.

But when it comes to annotation- or marginalia, as coined in 1832 by the keen margin scribbler Samuel Taylor Coleridge- I've always been a subscriber. In an eloquent post on the Guardian's Books Blog, Toby Lichtig expresses his fondness for "defacing" books with the smears and scrawls that herald ownership of that book. He writes:

"I'm not just talking about highbrow jottings: notes and queries, references and witticisms, the literary art of "marginalia". No, in my library anything goes: doodles, numbers, addresses, lists, recipes and the ensuing food stains."

I wholeheartedly endorse Lichtig's contention: your imprint on a book connects its flesh to yours. Your jottings, relevant or not, and your "mutilation"- Lichtig talks about torn covers, bathtub-submersions- will be forever bound to your experience of the book. In the manner of the if-a-tree-falls-in-the-woods commonplace: if you don't leave your thumbprint on a book, what does it matter if you've read it?

My annotative habits include underlining resonant quotes, dog-earing pages with provoking passages, occasionally scribbling a phone number if the open book on my lap is the only available writing surface. I, too, can claim responsibility for a coffee stain or two, a dirt smudge from a book riding around in my purse. Needless to say, neat freak or not, leaving traces in a book I own is an inextricable part of the reading process. Not all readers and writers agree:

But I'm with Lichtig, and Coleridge, and the herds of twitching-pen-armed readers eager to eat the books they read. I know eReaders like the Kindle have annotative capabilities- I made my friend show me how she organizes notes on the psychology journals she reads for her grad school program- but what does a computerized list of remarks have to tell me about who, or where, I was when I read something? Or my mood? Or what was going on in my life? The organic nature of reading a real book owes much to this practice of annotation, in my mind, and I'm not giving it up without a fight. Or, at the very least, a considerable price reduction.

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.

Mightier Than the Sword

"My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane."
Graham Greene

Ten minutes into a three hour work meeting last week, my pen gave out. I was taking punctilious notes, delineated by headings and organized by bullet points, in my Christmas tree green spiral notebook. I like taking notes. The physical connection between my brain and the information helps lock it into memory. It's also nostalgic, a wistful reminder of my days as a diligent student.

It was a black, medium point, retractable EasyTouch Pilot pen. Reliable until this sudden demise. I could have brought my laptop with me, as most of my coworkers do. But, as I said, I appreciate the organic work of taking notes by hand. I like the smoothness- no clicking or clacking. (Once, when I was a magazine intern making a cold call, my interviewee asked me if I was popping popcorn in the background.) The permanence of ink also exudes a sort of confidence- Wite-Out really just calls attention to your errors- and even fearlessness: those who do crossword puzzles in pen categorically intimidate me.

I knew several people in my English classes at Penn who always began essay drafts in pen, only later transcribing them into Word. Writing, creative or academic or administrative, necessitates an attention to detail and union with the craft that blurs with the distance between typist and computer screen.

Pens also make elegant gifts. In fact, I have several engraved Tiffany pens locked in a file drawer at my desk, as-needed gratuities for my boss's clients. So, too, do handwritten missives, like the Irish artists Lenka Clayton and Michael Crowe's April 2009 project to send personal letters to all 467 households in their town.

Each postcard, piece of notebook paper, folder, tag, or Post-it note was composed in pen. The motive was the recognition of the personalized penned note as an artform, one that is steadily waning in our digital age. While learning cursive constituted an entire class period throughout elementary school for me, scholars like Oberlin professor Anne Trubek have heralded the end of handwriting. She writes in Miller-McCune,

"When people hear I am writing about the possible end of handwriting, many come up with examples of things we will always need handwriting for: endorsing checks (no longer needed at an ATM), grocery lists (smartphones have note-taking functions), signatures (not even needed to file taxes anymore). These will not be what we would lose. We may, however, forsake some neurological memory. I imagine some pathways in our brains will atrophy. Then again, I imagine my brain is developing new cognitive pathways each time I hit control C or double click Firefox. That I can touch-type, my fingers magically dancing on my keyboard, free of any conscious effort (much as you are looking at letters and making meaning in your head right now as you read), amazes me.... Handwriting is not going anywhere soon. But it is going."

It's like unwrapping a gift every time I find a sample of my loopy, lumbering childhood writing, be it a diary (truncated after five entries), class essay, or construction paper birthday card for my mom. When I imagine a typical school classroom, I see a laminated alphabet script banner above the blackboard, a dotted line bisecting it to form a ceiling for the lowercase letters. Luckily, respect for penmanship remains strong, not just with experiments like the Irish artists' but also in celebrations like National Handwriting Day (John Hancock's birthday, January 23) and websites like the imaginative Firmuhment, entirely handwritten and beautiful. Seriously, click on the link.

It goes without saying that typing and word processing are integral to my work day, and my personal life. I use the iPhone Listmaker app in lieu of a paper grocery list, just as Trubek predicts; I keep in touch via email; at work I use Word and Excel and PowerPoint to track the proceedings of each of the journals my team publishes. But I also write To Do post-its for myself, annotate my books by hand, mail thank you notes, and, yes, even sometimes scribble a quote or a thought or a descriptive line by hand like my classmates.

As with many aspects of the old-new media conflict I have covered, and will cover, I advocate a marriage that accommodates both. I think we would suffer intellectually and creatively without penmanship, but also without technological composition. The latter goes without saying: when my pen died and I was computerless at that work meeting, I was out of luck. Until a coworker across the table handed me a pen.