Monday, February 14, 2011

in defense of Twitter for students of philosophy and religion (from FB)



I see lots of spam, but I get a ton of useful input on Twitter. It's changed my life--having a writing community like I have long felt was missing from my life. Much of the traffic is kinda mindless, but much of it is golden, especially if you make sure to unfollow the ones that turn out to be boring. I've hooked up with lots of interesting folks who've asked penetrating questions about my work, started up correspondences, shared many a hearty link. Don't understand what people are talking about when they call it silly. It's easy to filter out the silly stuff, but hard to justify overlooking the opportunity without good reason.

got ten blogs, archive the tweets on my Livejournal. addicted to convenient web publishing formats. writing a shit ton. I don't agree there's diminishing returns. working is always better than not working. I just post stuff, archive it, forget about it. excellent practice. my readers tell me what is the best stuff by responding and retweeting.

Or, to put it quickly, "folks love one-liners."

The question comes up of whether it's worth doing this writing on Twitter, since most of the time people don't even see or reply to the post. Why put myself through the pain of rereading and editing if it's just writing practice? I don't see twitter writing as something that should be held to any kind of high standard--why not just make an appropriate demand?

I honestly don't see what is wrong with this. maybe I'm wasting my time, but it sure seems like it's helping me become a much better writer. I never had anybody reading my stuff who understood it before. everybody I know personally tells me "wish I could read it but don't care." but tons of people in the net esoterica community are eating it up. like a stand up comedian, no matter how good the material, got to have the right audience. my alchemy blog is up to 400 hits a day. things are starting to look good for me as a writer, although I just bombed out of the GTU's cold-hearted abejctly unsupportive MA process and was stressing and despairing about my failure in academia. So tell me, why do you have a negative impression of Twitter?

email me ted.hand@gmail.com if you'd be interested to see a thousand pages or so of archives of the twitter conversations, I have them archived as pdf via this great service Tweet Book

one more thing I'll mention that I really dig about Twitter -- the opportunity to popularize the research of my friends and favorite scholars.

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