Kafka would have had a Twitter feed! And so would have Hemingway, and so would have Virgil, and so would have Sappho. It’s a tool for writing. Heraclitus would have had a fucking Twitter feed.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly of all, now that the other half writes—all the jocks and high-school girls and video store employees and D-list celebrities—it seems comparable only to a kind of police action that the people who once thought they were the chosen writers, that they were this generation’s idea-smiths, are now so up in arms.
Those other people—those everyday people who weren’t supposed to have thoughts, who aren’t known for reading David Foster Wallace or Dostoevsky or James Joyce, those overlooked people from whom we buy groceries, who fix our cars, clean our houses, and vote differently than we do—weren’t supposed to become writers.
Now that suburban housewives in Missouri are letting their thoughts be known via Twitter, it’s as if writing itself is thought to be under attack, invaded from all sides by the unwashed masses whose thoughts have not been sanctioned as Literature™.
In many ways, I’m reminded of Truman Capote’s infamous put-down of Jack Kerouac: ‘That’s not writing, it’s typing.’
So there seem to be quite a lot of assumptions at work here, with so many class, political, and even gender implications for who is allowed to speak, who we are meant to listen to, who can write, how they are permitted to do so, in what social contexts writing is meant to occur, and what topics can be legitimately addressed by others, that I’d hope a much longer discussion about this might someday take place. Until then, we get Maureen Dowd.
” BLDGBLOG: How the Other Half Writes: In Defense of Twitter
