The Plague

I read an essay by a senior editor at the Atlantic recently that began, “I finished up Middle-march two days ago, and had a good debate about it on Twitter.”

Cartoon of The Grim Reaper looming over people who use Twitter

Twitter (for the five people in America still blissfully ignorant of it) is a publishing platform that allows one to fire off bursts of written thought from just about anywhere onto the Internet for all to read. You Twitter on your computer while you fritter away the workday. You Twitter on your iPad while watching American Idol at night. You Twitter on your cell phone while standing in line at the grocery store. Or eating dinner at a Wolfgang Puck’s. Or milling at a party pretending to make conversation.

The goal of Twitter is to make publishing as frictionless as possible. As soon as a thought pops into your head you shunt it out to Twitter before your mind has a chance to edit it, reject it, or simply forget it. Goodness knows how many truly wonderful thoughts went unuttered before Twitter arrived on the scene to preserve them all.

For people who believe that writing should be effortless, Twitter is a boon. Its only downside is that your zipless thought must be expressed in no more than 140 characters. (Note: That’s 140 characters, not 140 words.)

So this poor fellow at the Atlantic made his way through all 900 pages of George Eliot and then within the hour began “debating” it using a medium that limits thoughts to 140 characters. Middlemarch—considered by some the greatest English novel—runs roughly 320,000 words. Concerning the question of Rosamond’s ultimate happiness, for instance, he tweeted, “I thought she was all ‘Gimme the loot, gimme the loot, gimme the loot.’ And she got it.” In another burst he rendered his final verdict on Eliot’s opus: “She has a total handle on language, but I just thought she couldn’t bring it all together, as you say.”

Well.