Digital Lab Assignment #6

I chose option two because I felt that it would be easier to create smaller, individual narratives rather than a long story. I liked the idea of being able to create small stories or one-stanza poems through the Twitter platform. Obviously, using Twitter to tell a story–no matter the length– is not a conventional method. However, I think it’s challenging and interesting to attempt to create narratives in so few characters or words.

I’d say overall, my attempt was successful. However, my response sort of turned into a combination of the two options. Although my tweets were their own little stories, they all ended up being a little bit connected. However, I think that’s kind of the nature of tweets; like Tao Lin’s collection of tweets, there seems to be an underlying theme to my tweets, despite the fact that they are independent and were intended to be unconnected. I think it would be hard to force tweets to be completely disconnected given their nature. Tweets, to me, are kind of like a stream of consciousness. Also, given the fact that I followed the prompt of the assignment, all of my tweets are somehow related to love which automatically connects them in at least one way. They were also all kind of a personal narrative, but maybe to the reader that isn’t as obvious as it is to me.

Due to the required brevity of my little poems, I was forced to find ways to create understandable narratives with beginnings, middles, and ends. I think Twitter also forced me to get rid of the “fluff” in my poems. When writing in other forums or with other mediums, I often find myself trying to sound more poetic or literary. Twitter forced me to write in a way that conveyed the information as briefly and concisely as possible. I think Twitter gave my little poems a sense of compression both literally and figuratively. The character limit often gives tweets a sense of urgency that other forms of literature do not have. I think this is the most unique characteristic of “Twitter literature.” It was also fun to challenge myself to connect my tweets to the prompt of “love” without making them connected to each other. I really enjoyed doing this assignment.

I personally am not a fan of Twitter as a platform. However, I can see how “Twitter novels” and “Twitter story” might have some literary value. In this class, I try to keep an open mind about what could be considered literarily valuable. I think in this day and age of technological advancement, it’s important to keep myself open to new perspectives and ideas. In my mind, tweets are kind of like little poems. My first thought when I read the instructions was that it would be interesting to create a poem where each tweet is a stanza. I think Twitter kind of reframes the way that authors write literature as well as how readers consume literature, which is incredibly interesting. It was a lot harder to create specific characters with developed psyches and relatable characteristics through Twitter than it is normally. Although, I think this might be one of the beauties of the platform. Twitter kind of reminds me of flash fiction in the way that you can still have characters in your stories, they just might not be conventionally represented or presented.