3 ms·

But Twitter isn't "oral tradition" by any definition of the word. I dare you to find any property that can be said of written poems with respect to those being

But Twitter isn't "oral tradition" by any definition of the word. I dare you to find any property that can be said of written poems with respect to those being transcendent, which can't also be said of Twitter threads (other than "they've existed since the beginning of writing").

BjoernKW 8y ago
The two don't really compare. Poetry is a form of literature. I can use Twitter as a medium for writing and publishing poetry. A poem written on Twitter and deleted the next day is no more permanent or long-lasting than a poem that's solely available in the oral tradition, perhaps much less so. Why are epics such as Beowulf or the Epic of Gilgamesh considered literature while others aren't? It's because someone at some point recorded them in a more permanent manner so future generations could read them in their unadulterated form (as much as that can be said of stories that probably had been changed and embellished multiple times already before someone wrote them down). A thread on Twitter however can be deleted, added to, remixed, retweeted and forked at any time, which certainly are very interesting properties for creating art but I'm not sure if that art should be called literature or rather something else entirely. Anyway, as originally stated what does and doesn't constitute literature isn't very precisely defined. So, this probably is hairsplitting anyway.
- TuringTest 8y ago
  You can burn the Library of Alexandria, and you can make copies of tweets. There's nothing inherent to the art form in the way that copies are stored. My point is that there is a form of literature that is native to Twitter (or public IM in general), which takes advantage of the specifics of the medium (in particular, unfolding the story at piecemeal bits in real time, and reacting to users comments to tweak the next elements of the story). The end result may be transcribed to more persistent written storage, but it's not the whole experience (just like reading The Three Musketeers as a book is slightly different to what people waiting for the next chapter in the newspaper would have experienced).

BjoernKW 8y ago

The two don't really compare. Poetry is a form of literature. I can use Twitter as a medium for writing and publishing poetry. A poem written on Twitter and deleted the next day is no more permanent or long-lasting than a poem that's solely available in the oral tradition, perhaps much less so. Why are epics such as Beowulf or the Epic of Gilgamesh considered literature while others aren't? It's because someone at some point recorded them in a more permanent manner so future generations could read them in their unadulterated form (as much as that can be said of stories that probably had been changed and embellished multiple times already before someone wrote them down). A thread on Twitter however can be deleted, added to, remixed, retweeted and forked at any time, which certainly are very interesting properties for creating art but I'm not sure if that art should be called literature or rather something else entirely. Anyway, as originally stated what does and doesn't constitute literature isn't very precisely defined. So, this probably is hairsplitting anyway.

TuringTest 8y ago
You can burn the Library of Alexandria, and you can make copies of tweets. There's nothing inherent to the art form in the way that copies are stored. My point is that there is a form of literature that is native to Twitter (or public IM in general), which takes advantage of the specifics of the medium (in particular, unfolding the story at piecemeal bits in real time, and reacting to users comments to tweak the next elements of the story). The end result may be transcribed to more persistent written storage, but it's not the whole experience (just like reading The Three Musketeers as a book is slightly different to what people waiting for the next chapter in the newspaper would have experienced).