Recorded

THE TWITTER NARRATIVE

Seriality and Storytelling in Social Media poses an intriguing point about the importance of the relationship between the creation of a narrative and the eventual meaning of the narrative. From the first letter typed on the page to the final compilation of thoughts in the entire plot, every step is important to the eventual context of the narrative. Social media narratives, specifically, reinforce contextual significance because a short phrase has little meaning without prior platform context or social context. The entire meaning of the narrative can be changed through the simplest shift of context.

The essence of a twitter narrative is centered around the disjointed yet fluid nature of the content, as presented in a series of punctuated phrases that each elicit a different emotion or aim to suggest a specific idea. Jennifer Egan’s artful piece about “The Beauties” begins in the same vague manner that its narrative holds as a key characteristic in the storyline. A multi-level parallelism. The sequential nature of this piece both reflects and creates, actively shifting the meanings of past entries through the addition of new content that progresses the narrative as well as shapes what has already been established as part of the narrative. Egan’s narrative features a series of individual tweets that could each be standalone, retaining an individual meaning, but altogether have a contextual meaning.

Dear David’s documentation of the ghost haunting his apartment is similar to Egan’s narrative in that it is a series of rather disjointed thoughts that all come together to celebrate a greater contextual meaning. The disparity, though, lies in the fact that each of David’s new tweets is posted as a reply to the previous thought. This gives the narrative an additional dimension of its sequential aspect, and deepens the notion that these pieces were not intended to represent their standalone meanings, but rather serve to emphasize the overall meaning and progress the narrative. This is a much more structured attempt at creating a narrative from a series of individual thoughts, as shown through the sequential method of presentation.

The 140-character novel trend is a rather frustrating one. A novel is called a novel because it has the characteristic of being long-winded and detail-filled, and these tweet novels represent no such identity. While I appreciate the creativity behind the careful and simultaneous allocation of letters and meaning, I do not like the cliffhangers whose characters have no name or description, and whose details consist of a single adjective. Never will a single tweet be the platform upon which a great novel will be built. An idea, though, is a viable option.

In ‘13 Beautiful Pieces of Twitter Fiction Remind Us How Powerful Reading Can Be’ we see just how useful social media can be in reinventing historical works of fiction to provide updated context and meaning. Chaucer as a participant in the twittersphere is just as impressive as it is unfathomable. The sheer difficulty of the Canterbury Tales is enough to make us question the decision to transfer his works onto a platform so colloquial. Twitter reworkings of original texts also provide the opportunity to further develop and explore the characters of these texts by creating a contextually based inner monologue diary that deepens the plot and creates unheard of intricacies between the storyline and the characters’ identities.

~LCS