(2017-09-10) Rise Of The Twitter Thread Tweet Storm

Virginia Heffernan: The Rise of the Twitter Thread (TweetStorm)

We don’t get to choose the literary genre of our epoch, and in this worst-of-times-worst-of-times political era, we have the Twitter thread

A thread is a call to something that Twitter culture, in its far-off playful days, used to condemn implicitly: earnest commitment to a train of thought. But the mental smog of Donald Trump times appears to have kindled an almost desperate longing for clarity even among cold-eyed Twitter wags

People who write for a living might be inclined to slag off threads as bloviation, stemwinders delivered by guys you’re stuck next to on a Greyhound. True, some threads lurch like drunks; some are flaky, perverse. But in 2017, even the worst of these fragmented lectures beats the traditional ballads of despair in unsocial media.

Some days, it seems as if the thread has even replaced the Atlantic-style treatise among much of the commentariat. A thread is quicker off the blocks and can be read in a fraction of the time, but also offers readers the intellectual satisfaction that magazine essays do, that snap of having your mind opened by an expert or a provocateur

Sexton teaches writing and linguistics at Georgia Southern University, and has published four works of fiction, as well as a recent book of dispatches and analysis from the 2016 campaign trail. Sexton described threading to me as a “linguistic exercise to see how the mind works in quick succession while confined within a certain space.” Abramson has edited or written more than a dozen books, mostly on or of poetry, and is also a graduate of Harvard Law School and former public defender. He calls threading “a formal gesture in the same way a sonnet is.”