<![CDATA[Twitter as a Medium for Fiction? “Black Box” by Jennifer Egan]]>

<![CDATA[Twitter as a Medium for Fiction? “Black Box” by Jennifer Egan]]>Follow @NYerFiction for “Black Box,” which will appear in ten nightly installments, from 8 to 9 P.M. E.T. If you miss it on Twitter, you’ll find each day’s installment collated here on Page-Turner.

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The latest evolutionary mutation of literary mediums is here–short stories on Twitter.

I’ve never been impressed with Twitter, except for its ability to propel the hashtag from IRC networks to colloquial diction. I follow two comedians regularly and the rest of the people get spot-glances from my homepage whenever I log in, which is about once every 3 days. Nothing says, “I was the attention-starved middle child,” like regularly using Twitter.

Twitter is annoying. It’s a way to blog that’s as random and incoherent as writing on a bathroom wall. To use it to present staggered fictional prose, one 140-character-or-less sentence at a time, makes it more annoying. Serialized fiction deadens the reading experience and is done mostly for the profit of the publisher.

Sorry, Jennifer Egan. Tweeting your work is like painting in period blood. The final product still matters more than the unique means of production. (Also, in my elitist opinion, this “story” is too meh for The New Yorker. Try turning it into a T.S. Eliot poem.)

Fail Whale.

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