Saturday's Derision

The Twitter Novel: Fashion or a Fad?

An Argument Against The Twitter Novel

It took DSM a long time to embrace Twitter. The micro-blogging service sounded inane, brimming with words spewed hastily to readers that barely read. Reading a sentence online is different than reading a sentence in a book. Even the most acute readers are influenced by the machine. A particular haze descends. Words march by like uniformed soldiers. Our eyes gloss over. Twitter is the king of gloss. Reading on Twitter is like riding a tall water slide, watching the landscape zip by. Sure, you can see the rooftops and the clouds, maybe even a distant plane moving across the sky. But it takes sheer determination to separate the joys of being on a water slide and the challenge of registering clearly an image — and with that image a thought, and with that thought an opinion.

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