Sherry Chandler » Twitter and Wilfer
Twitter and Wilfer
I have totally missed MySpace and Facebook, have no desire to own a Blackberry, have no real concept what it means to Digg it!, and I do not do Instant Messaging. I live in a place, after all, where the only way to connect is by modem via telephone. But, thanks to Ceri Radford at the Telegraph, I now know that Twitter:
is a website linking up people who post what they’re doing, moment to moment, in no more than 140 characters. It sort of works on the premise that blogging is too slow and complex – make of that what you will.
A single twitter, apparently, is called a tweet. There are some who would make poetry of Twitterings.
Ceri also defines wilfer for me,
If you followed the link to Twitter but then got distracted by checking your email, the price of a plane ticket to Amsterdam, the weather in London and the availability of an Ikea sofa then you are, like me, a wilfer.
Wilf stands for ‘What Was I Looking For?’, a term which has been coined to describe those who amble absent-mindedly through cyberspace. I am one of them.
I got to all these places via Robert Peake’s blog — was I wilfering? Robert is perhaps not so much a dinosaur about things web as am I, but he is not too sanquine about Twitter poetry:
The trend here is toward quantity - the mythic and sometimes actual possibility of high volumes of reader traffic drives a proportionate amount of new content. This quantity-focused approach to generating textual content can actually change language itself. What, for example, does the word “friend” mean when you can have hundreds, even thousands of them by hustling links to your MySpace account?…
When I wilfer the internet (new word, thanks Ceri) or channel surf TV, I am in a hyper-browsing mode - scanning and skimming. So, it comes as little surprise that on my own site, a fairly high volume of global daily traffic translates to only a micro-fractional number of comments. Like me, most visitors probably bounce off this site in a matter of seconds. (Especially if they are just looking for material for their next school essay.) This is the major obstacle online creative writing journals have to contend with, and why experiments like Twitter poetry will probably only ever remain as such.
We care about poetry precisely because it exists outside this frenetic word-space. We care about poetry because it represents a kind of necessary antidote to the soul-draining quantification and commoditization of language the information age has brought. All good poems, no matter their style, share this: an enforced attention to language, and some degree of innovation upon it.
I am subcribed to Poetry Daily’s Poet’s Pick feature for National Poetry Month. Today’s poem was Andrew Marvell’s “On a Drop of Dew.” I found it practically impossible to read that poem on my computer screen. I had to make myself stop and read each word, each line out loud (fortunately my office is deserted this morning), noticing where there were commas, periods, puzzling the sense back together. Only after I solved the puzzle could I find joy in the craft.
Marvel’s language is old-fashioned and condensed, so I may have had to do that anyway but I find it practically impossible to read anything that requires close attention on the web, least of all a poem. There is something about the screen, the mouse, the back-lighting that won’t let my eye rest, and so I “hyper-browse.” I wouldn’t call if wilfering because I don’t get distracted from what I went after. I didn’t really go after anything. I’m just browsing for the web equivalent of sound bites.
For me, poetry and the web fight each other. Wonderful to be sent a Marvel poem I probably would not have found on my own, wonderful to have a canny exegesis by J. Allyn Rosser. Awful to have those things on a computer screen.
Why, then, do I blog?
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4 Comments
1. Robert replies at 12th April 2007, 9:30 pm :
Hi Sherry,
Thanks for pitching in to the conversation. I suppose I, too, could ask, “why do I blog?” given how I see social networking and the advancement of language (and self) thorough poetry as somewhat fundamentally mutually incompatible. I converted my personal website to a blog format shortly after transitioning from being an independent technology consultant to working for another company full-time. I basically collated my professional and personal websites into one, and chose a blog format because it offered an easy, chronology-based content management system.
As I continued to write technology articles for a trade magazine, I found I could “float” ideas to the blogosphere, create dialog, and eventually roll up these rough ideas into a formal article for print. Having transitioned again recently into talking much more about poetry than programming, I find that the blogosphere is still a very useful place to put out protean thoughts and ideas to a global audience. The internet is basically a confederation of special interest groups, and so is a useful tool for me to toss around ideas poetry-minded people I might never converse with otherwise.
That said, talking about poetry in an informal way is very different than sharing poetry with an audience. Given the endemically short attention span of web surfers, I don’t expect them to really “take in” a poem in the same way they would on the page, and so rarely share much of my own work in this way.
All that said, when I’m bleary-eyed and numb from network news or internet wilfering, it is poetry (on the page) that brings me back to a subtle and intimate relationship with language. That’s why I call it an antidote, yet also continue to blog in a very strategic way.
What about you?
2. Tommy replies at 13th April 2007, 9:10 am :
I have always found it easier to proof read something if I print it out than if it’s sitting on the screen. Perhaps it’s the backlighting, perhaps it’s the constant scrolling, perhaps I’m just distracted by the myriad options that a modern computer offers. A lot of science fiction writers foresee the antiquation of books in favor of electronic screens and chips that can store an entire library’s worth of text.
I prefer the weight, the texture, the smell. Plus, a book isn’t that expensive, and doesn’t need batteries.
Love,
T
3. sherry replies at 13th April 2007, 4:02 pm :
For me, Robert, I think the one-word answer would have to be “community.” But being older, I want a community a little slower and smaller, maybe deeper but definitely a little more restrained. I enjoy the eclectic community I’ve been developing here over the last two years.
I could never twitter but I do find the length of a typical blog post about what I’m comfortable with on the web. A lot of “white” space — I have to refuse to read blogs done on black backgrounds, my old eyes just won’t tolerate ‘em (you have a very readable blog) — plenty of clean graphics, and ideas succinctly expressed. Things that require more than say two rolls of the scroll tend to lose me. Most bloggers aren’t good enough writers to overcome the limitations of the medium for more than that.
I like your notion of tossing out “protean ideas,” but so far I can’t say I’ve developed any ideas beyond the protean. I do tend to think out of the end of my pen or with my fingertips so the blog is sometimes good in helping me put my thoughts together. The other side is that I sometimes paint myself into rhetorical corners and wind up spouting nonsense.
I’m not much of a theorizer about poetry or much of a strategist. I’m more a packrat or a bower bird. I go after the shiney ideas. And I can’t stay away from politics and pop culture. Unlike Ceri, I do find the web a good place to learn. Pick up an idea here, a notion there, and bring them back here to build my elaborate nest, hoping to attract something like a muse.
Did I just contradict what I said yesterday? I’m like that.
4. Robert replies at 16th April 2007, 12:40 am :
Lovely image. Happy nest-building!
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