"To those claiming "Twitter" (singular mass) is "this" or "that" (insert blanket generalisation), some perspective." (Simon Sellars @ballardian on Twitter.)
Tweetping offers visualisation of global Twitter usage in real time.
Make sure you have a look next time you're awake in the dead of the night. The world is twittering away while we (do not) sleep.
(see Mulberry Road for the other 25, if you will.)
At Granta Online, six poets are interviewed about Poetry Parnassus, an enormous poetry love-in happening at Southbank in London this week.
Susan Hawthorne reviews Robyn Rowland's Seasons of doubt and burning: New and Selected Poems at Cordite.
Jerry Seinfeld's new web comedy, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, premieres online on July 19.
How to sort out Facebook and those tiresome not-so-new email addresses they have lumbered some of us with. (Apparently they may have synced with your friends' email on your phone as well! Who knew?) From ReadWriteWeb.
Finally, a 76-strong booklist of upcoming titles for the second half of the year from The Millions.
And the Complete Review reports on the rentrée littéraire in France. Not the Tour. Just for a change.
Newsweek decrees, via The Daily Beast website, that the geeks have inherited the earth.
They've published a Digital Power Index of 100 movers and shakers, conveniently arranged by category for those of us who enjoy such things. (Larry Page is an 'innovator' and Sergey Brin is a 'visionary'. Or vice versa.)
Something in here for everyone, I think.
But two-faced Twitter has also brought about, in its opposite aspect, the very last thing to have been expected from the internet: a renovation of the epigram or aphorism, a revaluation of the literary virtues of terseness and impersonality.
This means that Twitter, officially a microblogging platform, in practice has often functioned in a way opposite to the blog. Of course a tweet is just a tweet, not to be made too much of. Even so, La Rochefoucauld, Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Parker, Cyril Connolly, the Kafka of The Blue Octavo Notebooks, Cioran — they would have been excellent tweeters, and the best tweets, today, rival their greatest one-liners. (In fact to encounter their sententiae parcelled out as tweets would have made for a better experience than reading The Unquiet Grave or The Trouble with Being Born straight through. Aphorisms are ideally consumed like nuts or candies, a handful at a time.) So Twitter doesn’t only have the widely recognized usefulness of providing updates on news and revolution, and illuminating links, and many laughs and smirks. It has also brought about a surprising revival of the epigrammatic impulse in a literary culture that otherwise values the merely personal and the super-colloquial as badges of authenticity.
“Write as short as you can/ In order/ Of what matters,” John Berryman counseled in a pre-tweet of 44 characters. Favorite that, followers.
Via The Millions.
Crossposted at Mulberry Road.
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