Twitter: A ToC for the Internet – Both Highbrow and Lowbrow

Some people of my acquaintance have expressed surprise for my acceptance of/ fondness for/ almost daily references to Twitter. 

 

My headline gives it away a bit: I think of Twitter as a daily, ever-updating Table of Contents for my own personal Internet.  The feeds that I follow reflect my professional interests and some personal passions: books and publishing, writers and writing, arts education, films, music, NPR, news, and politics – and notice how one topic nicely blends into the next.  (Demonstrating the blend is my favorite tweet of recent days, from Kelly McBride (@kellymcb) “NPR has totally owned this 100-year-anniversary of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring”; I love a centennial of classical music being celebrated in such contemporary language.) Through Twitter I’ve been to websites I might never have come across, read the work of writers I might never have discovered, and learned of breaking news well before the broadcast and cable outlets have it on screen. 

I have to give credit to Scott Simon, host of NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday, for convincing me to sign up for Twitter. I was firmly entrenched in the camp then pooh-poohing the 140 character limit and the reports of people tweeting their sandwich selection for lunch.  I was a bit dismayed when Mr. Simon first announced one Saturday morning ‘you can follow us on Twitter @nprscottsimon.’ Convinced he’d gone over to the dark side, it was some months – maybe a year or more - before I finally decided to explore it for myself.  Now it’s an indispensable part of my online day.  

Now let’s get to the Highbrow / Lowbrow part. Joyce Carol Oates joined Twitter last fall, and it wasn’t too long before someone mused that in the twittification of her deep thoughts, she might be writing the first Twitter novel. (Jason Boog of MediaBistro’s invaluable Galley Cat blog posted a Storyboard of her early tweets that you can see here http://bit.ly/14cNYSY.)

I haven’t seen a novel developing, but when I saw the succession of tweets she posted last week about an Op-Ed by James Atlas, the aggregate of these posts struck as a new form of essay. I’ve story-fied her tweets (via Storify) to make it easier to read, and you can see that aggregation here http://sfy.co/cJsw.  

The original piece by James Atlas, which had appeared in The New York Times the previous Sunday (May 19), was an unexpected paean to cable television series and the joys of binge viewing.  And since I’m guessing you’ll be as intrigued to read it as I was, you can find it here: http://nyti.ms/10L329u .

Somehow I never expected these titans of literature (that’s the highbrow component) to be so fluent in television series – from the described glories of Breaking Bad to high-water marks of The Sopranos and Oz to the apparently lesser Elementary.  Despite the fact that I have long argued that television as a medium does far more to engage the adult market than the vast majority of films do, I have still carried that prejudice from childhood that television viewing is lowbrow, the ‘vast wasteland’ with only occasionally redeeming oases. Perhaps the titans have given me the equivalent of a hall pass.

I’m sure that Mr. Atlas has convinced me to watch Breaking Bad - finally.  And Ms. Oates has captured for me one of the joys of reading in a way I hadn’t identified it before: “the silence of print”. What a wonderful phrase.

Jeanne McCafferty is an editor, writer and book designer.  You can see samples  of her work and learn how to contact her at www.jeannemccafferty.com.  She is on Twitter @IrishCabrini.