Anna Staniszewski

Since the world seems to be abuzz with Twitter, I figured it was time for me to put my two cents in. Although I’ve only been a Twitter user for a short period of time, I have come to appreciate certain aspects of it. The fact that you’re limited to 140 characters creates an interesting challenge for someone like me who hates writing in incomplete sentences. It means that I often have to reword what I want to say to make it fit, which is something that’s often required in creative writing as well. The brevity of the format also lends itself to really interesting literary ideas, such as retelling the classics in Twitter format (aka Twitterature).  It certainly shows that while the internet may have made more people into readers, our attention spans continue to grow shorter and shorter.

As for the social networking aspect of Twitter, that’s something I’m still trying to understand. Something like Facebook was much easier for me to catch on to because it helped put me in touch with people I’d lost contact with, and it was easy for me to follow the conversations people were having. On Twitter, because it’s so boiled down, I still find it a bit confusing to try to follow who said what to whom and why. I like that it’s a shorthand way of letting people know what you’re up to (especially if you’re promoting something like, say, a book) but in a way it almost seems to require a bit more patience because you have to decipher what others are saying. I’m sure this will all become clearer to me the more I use it, but for now I continue to feel a little bit out of touch with all this new-fangled technology.