a further descent into barbarism


I’ve started experimenting with an Overland Twitter account. Somehow, this really depresses me. OK, I like blogs, despite the TL;DR factor. Even though Facebook seems inherently inane, I can see that it’s useful, especially for events and so on. But the very idea of Twitter, embodied in its basic question ‘What are you doing?’,  seems less about overcoming alienation than enthusiastically embracing it, with most of the tweets reading like dialogue from Beckett. What are you doing? Nothing. What are you doing? Sitting in a garbage bin waiting to die.

So why sign up? Basically, if you want to promote something like a literary magazine in the twenty-first century, you embrace any opportunity for publicity that offers itself, whether you like it or not. Hence the ‘You kids get off my lawn!’ grumpiness about this post.

Still, I’m open to being convinced. Certainly, Macca‘s managed to transform Twitter into something like poetry so maybe there’s hidden depths to it. Still gotta sort out some things with WordPress, too.

Jeff Sparrow

Jeff Sparrow is a Walkley Award-winning writer, broadcaster and former editor of Overland.

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