Sentences As Tweets
.jpg)
Recently, I read A Place For Everything--a book about books. What I found particularly interesting was the Decretum Gratiani--a highly annotated 13th century legal text.
Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat asked on Twitter:
Writers and journalists: Has @Twitter made you a better writer or more concise in your expression? Is there a firewall of sorts between your Twitter posts and other writing, or do the former inspire the latter?
— Ruth Ben-Ghiat (@ruthbenghiat) January 2, 2021
Imagine a book where every sentence or phrase has a 'Like' or 'Share' button as a "citation". (Highlights are also a form of "Like" without them being a form of personalia). It is essentially a "highlight" with interactive metadata controls, which can be toggled on and off.
This is how the UI might look:
I suspect that the eye would naturally focus on the red hearts and the larger numbers (the "bling"), and you would miss the context. But it might be a useful tool for writers for expounding on sub-points. (This would not be a "firewall", but rather a "bulkhead door", sealed and watertight yet accessible).
***
I prefer paper books rather than social media posts because there are more interesting and useful 'Tweets' within them that aren't all saying, "I'm popular—or trying to be popular." But Twitter has certainly changed the writing process--mostly for the better. (I also use YouTube videos as a way of demonstrating the creative process with my songs in-progress. Instead of just overdubbing in audio, I create videos of the song drafts or rearrangements of them with individual parts replayed and replaced).
Besides, paper is inherently beautiful.
I was a music copyist in the 1980s, and still appreciate the feel and look of ink on different kinds of paper. To this day, I like the look of interactions between various pens and paper--particularly gel pens on newsprint or even napkins.
An example of my work circa 1985:
(I recommend following https://twitter.com/NotationIsGreat for its interesting postings of music notation through the ages).
Comments