Twitter, oh Twitter, what in good hell are you? I can't tell if you are bad for my writing or good for it. God damn Twitter. Every time I decide I ought to allow myself to make an account, I log on there and t never ends. I send tweet after tweet after tweet , and almost all of them get no likes and no retweets. Nevertheless I always keep pursuing it, because that website certainly seems far more populated than this website.
Blogs and message boards, even YouTube, it all somehow seems so dead in comparison to Twitter, don't you think? I think back to the long gone days of my childhood, when I used to hang out on message boards like Ultimate-Guitar.com, and my mind is half blown. How did I do it? It all seems so quiet now. Waiting 2-3 hours for a response. Having something called a "thread". Trying, obsessively, to get my post count numbers as high as whoever the biggest dogs on the forums were. How marvelously quaint it all seems now, in comparison to the massive highway that is Twitter. For that's what she really is ya know? She is a huge highway that has exits which all lead into major metropolises. You never know who you'll meet on there and you also never know where they're from or, for that matter, what they're talking about. It's like walking into the center of some shopping mall and everyone is just screaming. The message boards of old times weren't like this. They ewre like Wild West towns ..quiet, tranquil, slow and steady. Turns out folks had enough of that shit.....
It is terrible for me, personally, because as a writer I suppose I have naturally been born with the ambition to see my work read and respected, and as you can imagine, Twitter promises me that it--she--can make this happen fast for me. For example, at the moment, my specific account has almost 2,000 followers. That is a pretty high number and it is certainly far higher than what this blog receives (which it seems only I read). And yet...just like this blog ... all those 2,000 heads all just seem totally non-existent. The number is written there but where are they? I would say about five or six people, the same people all the time, seem to be the ones that take note of my tweets, out of all those 2,000, and it is, I have noticed, the same for the other users. There is a black girl from Atlanta, for instance, that I have taken a particularly liking to. She is very pretty and apparently lives her life runnin' a nail salon or a hair salon or something down there. She tweets all day long about many things -- primarily complaining about men -- but occasionally she posts hot pix and pics of her kids, the salon, her outfits, etc.
In total spite of her beauty, I seem to usually be the only one liking any of her tweets. 9 times out of 10. She has almost the exact same number of followers I have; and seems to have been around significantly longer than me. She has tweeted almost 14,000 times. I am getting close to 1500 myself. She's ahead of me! Maybe I will catch up. I tweet fast and also in big blocks , as you can imagine, due to being a "writer".
I guess I'm just very surprised by the lack of attention some of my tweets have received--not becuase I think they're any good or anything--but rather just because I thought Twitter's engine worked differently. Initially it appeared to me that the engine revolved, for example, more around keywords and stuff, instead of who you follow or don't follow. My idea was something like this: If I tweet about some topic like Nirvana's debut album "Bleach", or the book Cities of the Red Night , other people who are into those exact things will immediately--or eventually--come across my Twitter account. I thought it relied on keywords like this. It's not the case,however. Keywords are important on Twitter, and they do have the trending hashtag game going on daily, but the majority of users don't actively search by keywords like that, I don't think, and you can see this well enough by the lack of activity in regards to the keywords. Basically, Twitter is mostly just functioning like Facebook does: You follow people and follow their statuses in particular -- the end. I think this is shitty, I guess. I'm tired of it. This is exactly how Tumblr works too. Doesn't anyone else think this is boring? There has to be a better way! But what is it?
Hard to say, but my guess is that it will be an engine that actually pays far more attention to keywords like this and thus makes it far easier to come into contact with many people who are interested in just what you're interested in. Again, don't get me wrong: Twitter and even Tumblr are already pretty close to this, it's just that most people don't seem to be using it in this manner. They are just following the statuses --- and they can't be blamed, since the statuses are thrown in your face every time you log on, just like Facebook. Hence my opinion is that the keywords need to somehow be launched into your face, and not just the "trending hashtag" words, but specifically the keywords Twitter knows you like. It somehow has to be made easier to connect with people into what you are into ---a nd perhaps also stuff that is the exact opposite of what you are into. "It says you absolutely love Gore Vidal, Jim. Well, do you know that William F. Buckley was his arch nemesis in that time period?"
The entire user interface of the site probably needs to be redesigned. It's easy for me to imagine a site in the future where I wll be able to log on and have "buckets" of some type that I can look into, where each of my interests (and the various people tied to them) will all be stored, automatically, for me. Imagine a system that will help me keep track of all my various obsessions, for instance, by helping me to remember just how often I read about certain things. In our time now, the computer basically just treats every webpage and article you read equally; it does not differentiate between them. Imagine, however, if the computer could automatically help you remember just how many articles you read about Donald Trump or Beyonce or Celine Dion, etc, in the past 5 or 10 years.
If it could help you re-trace all those articles, automatically--even across different computers & devices, that'd be incredible. Netflix is already sort of doing this with the movies and TV shows you watch, and if you use a site like Goodreads, that site will help you manually keep track of all the books you read (which is incredible). But what if this could all just somehow happen automatically? It wouldn't have to be something you were forced into doing by the computer (because who would want to be forced?) but it could definitely be an option. Why not? I would be much more organized in that way! As it is now, I'm a mess.... I have no idea what my biggest obsession is ...I can't really remember. There are so many articles I hvae read and then lost,a nd this is in fact the big reason I personally appreciate Twitter: I endlessly link the articles I'm reading as I read them -- sometimes when I haven't even read them -- to remind myself that I was looking at them. Again though ... I gotta do it all manually. Why can't it just be AUTOMATIC?
Now I am beginning to imagine something that almost disturbs me, when it comes to the first simple robots we might soon see in the future. I am imagining a robot, for example, a rather simple one, that has been specifically designed to help writers like me, when we are suffering from writers block. The bot will be programmed, one imagines, to ask the struggling writer specific questions, based on his past history and favorite topics, etc., in order to hopefully "jump start" his daily writing. So a writer will sit down and he will say "Gina, I just can't think what the hell I ought to write today. Nothing is on my mind...I'm at a complete loss." The robot will then browse through the writers past and recent history. What articles has he been reading obsessively? What films has he been watching lately? What knd of people has he been following on social networks or meeting with in reality? The bot will attempt to make informed decisions based on this allocated information. "Jim, you gave a five star review to the book Naked Lunch by William Burroughs in late August. Why not try to write something about the mugwumps from that book? You said in your review how much you loved the mugwumps Burroughs wrote in." The writer shakes his head...he doesn't want to write of the mugwumps..he's over them. The robot socks it away somewhere ; it/she knows he might again be interested a month from then. She makes another suggestion. "Well, what about Renaissance Italy, Jim? This past month you've read a total of 30 articles that dealt with the Italian Renaissance, and on Amazon you browsed a number of fiction books set in that period. Maybe you could write of that Jim..." Again of course, Jim is not satisfied. "No, Gina, I don't want to write about the Renaissance yet. I still don't know enough." "Ok Jim, another idea... on Twitter you've been following this black hair stylist/aspiring rapper girl from Atlanta, Georgia, it seems you absolutely adore all her statuses and her photos... why don't you try to write something about her? As a fiction? Create a character from her, Jim."
Jim thinks for a moment...that isn't a bad idea, is it? "What shall I call her,Gina? What's a popular name in the Atlanta region for a person of African-American ancestry?"
Gina automatically comes up with a list of 10 differnt names. Jim picks one, and then he gets started with his story. He ends up with a novella at weeks end from the help the robot initially gave him....
--notes
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