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a further descent into barbarism

I’ve started experimenting with an Overland Twitter account. Somehow, this really depresses me. OK, I like blogs, despite the TL;DR factor. Even though Facebook seems inherently inane, I can see that it’s useful, especially for events and so on. But the very idea of Twitter, embodied in its basic question ‘What are you doing?’,  seems less about overcoming alienation than enthusiastically embracing it, with most of the tweets reading like dialogue from Beckett. What are you doing? Nothing. What are you doing? Sitting in a garbage bin waiting to die.

So why sign up? Basically, if you want to promote something like a literary magazine in the twenty-first century, you embrace any opportunity for publicity that offers itself, whether you like it or not. Hence the ‘You kids get off my lawn!’ grumpiness about this post.

Still, I’m open to being convinced. Certainly, Macca‘s managed to transform Twitter into something like poetry so maybe there’s hidden depths to it. Still gotta sort out some things with WordPress, too.

Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places.

If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate.

Jeff Sparrow is a Walkley Award-winning writer, broadcaster and former editor of Overland.

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Comments

  1. TL;DR = too long, did not read. What I mean is that the internet already involves a dumbing down, which is only exacerbated by Facebook. As for Twitter, well,it’s as dumb as they come.

  2. Ahh TL DR, otherwise known as “Can The Dinosaur Adapt”. You can look at it as a dumbing down. “Bloody idiots won’t let me take a thousand words to cover every base.” Or you can look at it as writers did before the existence of Government grants. “There’s the marketplace. Here’s the ideas. Can I write clearly and concisely enough to hold their attention all the way through?”

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