Twitter Fiction Revisited

October 26, 2009
Stacey Mason

A while ago we raised some questions about whether Twitter narrative needs to weed out the cheese sandwiches. After all, cheese sandwiches are, in fact, a part of our daily narrative. Unless you agree with David Mamet that cheese sandwiches aren’t tasty.

While these questions have not been answered entirely to our satisfaction , Susana Zaragoza has some interesting points about Twitter as a platform. Zaragoza argues that Twitter goes beyond the typical social networking site to offer proof of the emergence of Secondary Orality, the shift from the values of print literature to combine many of the values of both print and oral culture. She also seems to suggest that Twitter uses hypertext and multilinearity in a way that bridges the gap between social media and wikis, the future of which could be a complex narrative which promotes reconfiguration of the text, author, writing and literary education. The emergence of such a narrative is precisely the idea behind Mark Amerika’s suggestion of a Hypertextual Consciousness .

.