Twitter Me a Sweater

Since I’ve been on Twitter, I’ve been confused. My friends and family were also confused when I sent them an email blast to join me on one of the most popular communications vehicles today.

“I don’t get it,” a friend said to me a couple of months back. “If I go on, what am I supposed to say?

“Whatever you want. What’s going on in your life – your day.”

He smirked and shook his head as if he had been hit by something nonsensical, like a government official. “Like what do I do during the day that’s so interesting? I get up for work. I iron…Should I stop and tweet about my ironing? I don’t think that would be so amusing to people.”

“To a cleaners it would.”

Another friend, who I’d coaxed onto twitter a while ago, and who recently went off of it, said, “It doesn’t pay for me to be on. None of my friends want to go on, so I’m just going to stick with what works best – Facebook.”

Facebook – a medium where you can post all your thoughts, photos, daily comings and goings, favorite music, places to be and not to be, ponderings about whether you prefer one Harry Potter movie to another, what your ruminations are concerning the state of the food in your fridge as science experiments along with the state of the romantic lives of well-known celebrities who don’t really matter much and who you don’t know personally, but somehow are aware of tidbits concerning who they date, what they eat, and then, what side of the bed they sleep on – just in case you need to be cognizant of it for the purpose of effectively raising your children, getting a job promotion and bringing peace to the Middle East (and if this sounds ridiculous to you – it’s meant to be), and then just anything else you can think of and oust from your brain, especially if you don’t have the cash for psychotherapy.

Twitter – All of the above. Except in 140 characters.

That’s 140 characters, which is 140 letters, not 140 words, not 140 reflections , not 140 musings, or 140 ways to tie an Indian knot. 140 characters and this is the issue.

For those of us who have thoughts that extend the length of I-95 and who regularly speak the language of tangents while people listen to us with eyes glossed-over, 140 characters ain’t easy.

“Actually, in a way, it’s good,” a friend said. “It forces you to simplify content.”

“Simplification…Okay. I guess I’m all for that.” Especially since the last book I wrote was 120,000 words and now needs to be cut down to 90,000 (according to lit agents). A little education on simplification wouldn’t hurt. But then there’s the obvious that my other friend brought up to me when he mentioned his ironing - “But what should I write about that would be interesting to others, and then, if it’s so interesting, how do you bottle it up into one or two brief statements?”

He shrugged. “It really is another language.”

“Like pig latin,” I suggested.
 

He laughed. “Yeah.”

“Some people are just so good at it, y’know?” I relayed. “They know the ins and outs, the nuances. They have thousands of followers because they’ve mastered this art form.” I thought about it for a second. “It really is an art form. A craft.”

Tweets. Retweets . Lists. Hashtags and then all sorts of cryptic jargon. Some people have such twitter style and know-how. They definitely understand the craft. These days, forget about some usual acts of creation - painting, woodworking, needlepoint and knitting – I mean forget about knitting a sweater – just twitter one.

Some weeks ago, I went onto twitter after a hiatus of short duration, and realized I had gained some followers. Not much, but a couple.

Hmmm, I said to myself, off of twitter and somehow I accrued some followers.

After a scratching of my head, which if you notice, never helps a bit but for some reason we still do it, I wrote a few tweets, just to get back on the proverbial “horse.”

The next day when I went back on, I lost a couple.

I tried tweeting once more. Again, the next day, a handful of followers were gone.

Okay, I thought, this MUST stop. I write tweets and I’m LOSING followers?

In an effort to pull myself out of the hole labeled “tweeters that are just pleasantly tolerated, because we need as many tweeters as we can get to keep this thing going,” I sent a tweet over to a twitterer who has more than her fair share of followers and who writes the coolest tweets around. So cool that when I read them, I’m dizzied with astoundment and appreciation that I could say is akin to the astoundment and appreciation I experienced when I first read James Joyce.

The message I put out to her was rather simple: Hey-how come you tweet so well? Is there a class on tweeting that I don’t know about? There’s definitely a talent to it…

No answer yet, but I figure James Joyce got real busy writing Ulysses, so…

I got into another conversation with the friend who had made the comment about tweeting being a good way to learn “simplification.”

“So, “ I said, “I need more followers.” Not like this is the purpose of my life, but it would be nice.

He hands me a book on twitter and points to it. “This will teach you some things. Beyond the tweets, twitter is very viral. You need to learn the viral strategies.”

I shuddered.

Viral? Viral? It’s enough that I have to worry about the Swine Flu and now I have to think of “Viral” and Twitter?

… And as I place the book next to my laptop and put my fingers to the keys to write another tweet, I can’t help but reach for the antiseptic…  - Alisa Steinberg is a novelist, poet, and blogger, whose recently published book  Text Me, A Tale of Love and Technology  is available on Amazon.com in ebook format for Kindle, iPad, iPhone, Windows PC, BlackBerry, and Android, and will soon be available in both ebook and print formats on Amazon.com, Barnesand Noble.com and Borders.com              

 

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