As Twitter continues to be met with the warm (and arguably unlikely) embrace of writers like Joyce Carol Oates and Jennifer Egan (read the story she wrote for last year’s fiction issue of The New Yorker in its original serialized tweet form here), it’s becoming more and more urgent to discuss its merit as a literary medium.
In this piece written for The New Yorker‘s Page-Turner, essayist Thomas Beller explores the functionality of Twitter as a technological literary device.
The essay discusses Twitter’s legitimacy as a venue for publicly drafting ideas, its relationship with online permanence, and its tendency to create nebulous definitions of personal ownership. “This is one of the central paradoxes of our culture—everything is swallowed into oblivion but nothing goes away,” Beller writes. “On the screen, it’s no longer clear who is in charge of the words, or at what point they cross the line between being a fluid, rearrangeable thing in your mind and being a verifiable statement made in public, on the record, for which you may one day have to answer.”
