It Took Me Way Too Long to Remember the Word for, “One Word.”
In my last post about the craft of Twitter humor and storytelling I asked about the importance of the 140 limit. You know, because creativity loves restrictions. Well my old pal, and Xanga superstar, @Drakonskyr is making that text field look pretty roomy. For the last three days Daniel has been making the briefest of updates, only using one word each time and often limiting himself to a single syllable. This includes @ replies.
Intrigued.
A tweet’s relationship to time is an interesting thing. As I mentioned in my last post. @fireland’s tweet “— end of side one — ” gains something in meaning for every second it is not followed by a new update. There is also a quality dependent on the notion that you are reading content as it is produced. Obviously, this is not a necessary part of the experience. A solid one liner is still a solid one liner. (As a matter of fact, I just starred a number of tweets produced months ago. Wuddup @JasonPermenter) Daniel’s stream, however, is completely dependent on time. At least relative to his other tweets. This is unlike any account I’ve come across before. There aren’t any jokes. There is no perspective being pushed though his observations. The updates simply are. I’ll give you an example. On June 1st his tweets read: “transportation”, “affinity”, “inspectors?”, “fail”, and “failsafe”. He ended last night with, “SUCCESS” and began this morning with, “gloating”. (British punctuation FTW.)
I couldn’t even get a monolexic comment about the origins of this shift or an estimate about how long it will run but I hope that when it reaches its conclusion there will be absolutely no attention given to it.
In other Twitter news, @Mike_FTW will be ruling Brooklyn Museum’s @1stfans account with an iron fist for the entirety of June. The number of readers who care will be exactly zero though, as the account requires you to be a BM 1stfans member. At $20 a year, it’s actually a pretty good deal for people who would take advantage of the “IRL” social networking that goes on but charging for access to Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter accounts just seems ludicrous. Maybe you think that challenging the notions of monetary value for things is still an interesting question to raise in the art world. I don’t. I only mention it because I’ve always wondered what their guest artists do with the feed and Mike was kind enough to post a screen cap of his early updates.
Frankly, I would love to see the rise of throw away or one off accounts that were dedicated to a single narrative. I think the people behind the retelling of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off over the course of a single afternoon via Twitter and Foursquare provided a good proof of concept there. It certainly helps that the story was already well known and loved but I don’t think it would take much to make an original story go viral.
Some smug sons of bitches that subscribe:
