I find I have two types of friends, those that hate twitter but love facebook, and those that love twitter but don’t use facebook as much. I also find that my friends who are more literary-minded to be solidly in the twitter camp. Facebook is a bit like hanging out in reality, you talk as you would conversationally, but Twitter’s restriction of 140 characters makes you hyper-aware of the language you use, and it’s great fun to toy around with sound, alliteration, spelling and punctuation. Geeky lit things that non-writers just don’t find too amusing.

In fact, twitter is giving birth to an entire plethora of new genres - from Twitter Haiku to Twitter short stories (yes, a short story in 140 characters). It also forces its users to rethink the “rules” of language, thereby allowing it to be much more fluid.

English is such an amazingly versatile and adaptable language - kind of like linguistic Play-Doh, it is the perfect vehicle for use on Twitter. It’s also short, direct and punchy. I just can’t imagine some languages like French, with it’s long words, passive structures, anal grammar policies, and fearful, super-perfectionistic users, working too well. It would be interesting to see which language areas around the world take to Twitter, and where it falls behind.

For more on the various literary genres being inspired by Twitter, check out:
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/02/08/all_a_twitter/

This entry was posted by astrology detective on Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 at 2:17 pm and is filed under popwatch . You can trackback from your own site.