Thoughts on Twitter (Super-Meta Edition)
Tuesday, June 24th, 2014 01:15 pmI've been on Twitter for about a week now, and for the most part, it's a lot of fun. I especially like the ability I have now to keep connected with places/institutions that I like (the @SFMOMA feed in particular is really nice--not too many posts, but gorgeous photos of the works there, and thought-provoking questions) and cool people from present and past (getting back in touch with my old Smith roommate is really, really nice, as is seeing what my current LJ/DW/RL friends are up to.)
However,
kyrielle was right that Twitter is like a party where if you stop talking, people tend to forget about you and move on. It's also a party where a lot of conversations are out of context and I have little idea what's going on in some of them. One of my favorite fanartists is currently in the midst of a multi-tweet rant about people hating on her work because of its visual style (or at least, I think this is what is going on, and she hasn't given any context as to what started the rant in the first place.) I've gotten the hang of conversing with other people (although read out of context, I'm sure those tweets make very little sense.)
The other thing that is continually challenging to shortening my thoughts to 140 characters. I'm used to a blogging format like, well, this one, and it's tricky being less than expansive. The whole thing reminds me of an exercise I did in elementary school where we supposed to imagine that we were composing a telegram* and had to limit our words from 150 down to 50, with the word STOP for periods and FULL STOP for the ending. The temptation to insert the word STOP into my tweets is there, but then I think, whoa, that is five characters that I need! So, no telegramming tweets for the moment.
* A TELEGRAM. A FRIGGIN' TELEGRAM! At the time, I remember that my Mom had a few old telegrams that someone had sent her Mom, and I was pretty impressed with those. This does make me wonder what R. will be astounded that I have an actual, physical copy of, and whether he'll be given an assignment to compose a Tweet and view said assignment as crazy/outdated.
However,
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The other thing that is continually challenging to shortening my thoughts to 140 characters. I'm used to a blogging format like, well, this one, and it's tricky being less than expansive. The whole thing reminds me of an exercise I did in elementary school where we supposed to imagine that we were composing a telegram* and had to limit our words from 150 down to 50, with the word STOP for periods and FULL STOP for the ending. The temptation to insert the word STOP into my tweets is there, but then I think, whoa, that is five characters that I need! So, no telegramming tweets for the moment.
* A TELEGRAM. A FRIGGIN' TELEGRAM! At the time, I remember that my Mom had a few old telegrams that someone had sent her Mom, and I was pretty impressed with those. This does make me wonder what R. will be astounded that I have an actual, physical copy of, and whether he'll be given an assignment to compose a Tweet and view said assignment as crazy/outdated.