Twitter Me This

I've recently joined Twitter, and was promptly welcomed by my much tech-savvier friends to the "Twitterverse." Until this week, I avoided joining for reasons which remain quite murky to me. I can only hope that the process of writing them out, as I plan to do here, will clarify those reasons to a shiny sparkly finish. Without further ado, let's take the plunge into Murky-ville together!

Until seeing a presentation in technical communications recently at a conference, I would have argued that Twitter was an unnecessary timesuck living parasitically off the back of the greatest of timesucks, the internet. What is the use of yet another social networking tool for those who already post to facebook, write a blog, keep up with e-mail, use all of their unlimited texts, and call their parents back home on a regular basis? Oh, little did I know.

A techcom professor presented a fascinating case study of a group of folks from Wichita, KS who named themselves "ICT2DC." They describe their group formation process as: "meet on twitter, celebrate Obama's election, & take a road trip to the Inauguration." Each separate piece of this process provides plenty of thought-food, but we'll just start with "meet on twitter."

The idea of actually meeting someone new on Twitter astounds me. Three days into my Twitter experience (For which there should really be a word. I suggest "Twittience," although I am open to other, better neologisms.), I have eleven followers, with all of whom I have an "in-person" or "real-world" relationship. Of those eleven, ten I met while studying engineering outside of Boston, MA. These are the people I turn to when I can't figure out how to resize a photo or I just need to mainline some quick conversation about scientifically nerdy stuff. They're fantastic, and provide a fabulous counterpoint to the English/literary/book-centric mindset that could easily overwhelm my life. I feel more balanced and knowledgeable for their friendships, not to mention less like a humanistic, technophobic Luddite. It would certainly be a steep and slippery path to that latter state of affairs if I limited my interactions with my mac to the necessary word-processing and e-mailing of everyday graduate student-hood.

But had I not had those friends already, had I not made some mixed-up choices at seventeen about what I wanted to be when I grew up, had I not met these smart, funny, interesting people who just happen to build robots and widgets and real things while I make mountains out of intangible molehills, had none of these things happened, would I now be enjoying a tech-fix on Twitter?

I would wager not.

But this group who met on Twitter: they found each other through shared interests, particularly shared political interests. Were I to go scouting for people from here who think like me and happen to post on Twitter, I'm still not clear what added value I would bring to my life. The ICT2DC group actually got together in person and took a thoroughly blogged and tweeted road-trip to the capital. Although the experience sounds interesting, it's not one I'm up for. I have close relationships here in Vegas, not to mention dogs and school responsibilities. Road-tripping is a blast, but riding in a borrowed van with five potentially smelly people who I don't know well enough yet to make fun of for being smelly? Pass.

If Twitter doesn't provide new friends who may cross over into real-world friendship, then what about new friends who stay happily ensconced in the Twitterverse?

Cue a discussion of the law of diminishing returns. I have met a fantastical array of amazing people in my quarter-century or so of kicking around this earth. Many of them I already communicate with almost exclusively on-line, as they're out of the country, or leading busy busy lives, or at least in a distant time zone. But the on-line communication reads as an extension of their personalities, an on-going development of adult relationships which can encompass adult concerns as well as memories of good times in high school or college.

I worry that meeting new folks through on-line media would detract from the attention I can pay to folks I already know without adding substantial social or personal benefits. This worry--or fear, even--relates directly to the overwhelming heaviness I feel every time I consider trying to keep up with daily, or even weekly and monthly publications. There're too many, and they just keep happening. There's never an end in sight.

Aha! I feel a break-through. My fear is not that I will meet new people, but that I won't know when to stop meeting new people. Life just washes over you, again and again and again, without even the brief respite a true tide waning would provide. Shutting off entire avenues of communication, like Twitter, is not a reasonable coping strategy, but it is at least a clear one with easily defined boundaries. Just don't do it.

Call me the anti-Nike, but I do pride myself on having overcome this fear even before I figured out its true nature.

But then, I can't really claim credit for that. Really, despite all my mental bulwarking and hedging of bets, I succumbed to the lure of Twittience for one simple and underwhelming reason: A totalizing lack of resistance to peer pressure.

This one's for you, Miks. Don't worry, I really am enjoying Twitter.

Fear of Fiction

I wrote before that I might write on this. Now I have, but I don't think I'm done. There's too much still that I haven't dug up.

Reading Maus makes me want to write about fiction. You see, fiction frightens me.

I fear the criticism it might engender.
I fear running out of ideas.
I fear not being interesting enough.
I fear writing stilted dialogue.
But most of all, I fear truth.

In Part I of Maus, Art Spiegelman’s father, Vladek, finds and reads a short comic Art wrote about his mother’s suicide. For me, the suspense of reading that short comic before discovering Vladek’s response, of seeing how personal and critical that comic is, this suspense wore my nerves down to nubs.

Here would be a good place to point out that I don’t deal well with suspense. I cannot bear to watch any sitcom whose plot revolves around the inevitable revelation of someone’s deception. Just sitting there, knowing that Joey has been lying all along, and dreading the moment--because it will come--that Monica catches him in his lie. I’d rather change the channel, thank you.

Of course, the moment doesn’t always come in real life. For Art Spiegelman, it came when his father read a comic that Art never expected him to even know existed. Vladek’s response could hardly have been better: “It’s good you got it outside your system” (Spiegelman 104). But one could easily imagine a world in which Vladek did not find the comic, but in which the possibility that he find it dangles constantly, Damocles-style, over Art’s head.

And this is what I fear. What if I create something so personal, so critical, so true, that I stand suspenseful, every day, nervously glancing up to make sure that the possibility of a certain person reading it has not yet crashed down on me.

But wait, you say. Fiction is all about lies. So what truth is there to fear in it? And perhaps, yes, the things that happen in fiction are lies, and perhaps even the people are made up. Fiction is not about what happened, though, at least not the fiction I would like to write. Fiction is about how things are, and what people are like, and why we do the things we do. It may not have happened, but it must be believable.

I know that I’m making insanely gross over-generalizations here. ‘Fiction’ simply encompasses far too much for the things I say to hold true across the board. By ‘fiction,’ I actually mean, ‘the fiction I like to read, because that would be the fiction I would want to write.’ Certainly, I could write unbelievable and wildly popular romance novels if I desperately wanted to stuff my bank account, but I’m not that poor yet. Even then, I wouldn’t want to be writing them, I’d simply want to sell them. So ‘fiction,’ in this essay’s context, refers to something fictional I would be proud to have written for reasons entirely internal to the work itself.

Having worked out this definition, I don’t think I’ll ever write such a book. It frightens me. I can imagine, but only by straining and wincing, creating a portrait as raw and true as that of Vladek Spiegelman. In fact, the obvious thing to write after reading Maus is a portrait of one’s father. I can’t do that. I cannot submit someone so close and dear to me to such scrutiny.

I tend to forgive, to overlook one’s faults. I always go for the benefit of the doubt. I would make the worst cop, because I would believe every criminal that says she’s innocent. I am not naive. I am simply willing to make mistakes if it means the world I live in is a pretty good place.

Case in point: with that confession, I’ve hardly admitted a deep dark secret. And the confession itself is something of a gloss. At times, I try for forgiveness and fail. I am mean, and convince myself it was necessary. When I’m not avoiding thinking about the faults in others and myself, I’m focusing on them, bringing them into such sharp relief in my mind that all other thoughts fade away. But then, eventually, I find something shiny to distract me, and the world is a pretty good place again.

This is the other side of my fear of writing fiction. On the one hand, I do not want to write something so true that it offends my loved ones. I could give a hoot about strangers. Even if I overcame this aspect of the fear, however, I would have to contend with the fear of deliberately sending my mind into a dark place that it usually works overtime to avoid.

If best-selling romance novels are a field of flowers and butterflies, then fiction is the abandoned well at the field’s edge, with a thin voice screaming out of it to be rescued. I’d like to think of myself as a rescuer, but honestly, truthfully, painfully I am but a bystander.

Even this essay, non-fiction, uncritical of others, this doesn’t quite feel right. What matters? Art Spiegelman worries about portraying his father “like the racist caricature of the miserly old Jew.” This worry is much bigger than any I can have about the few words I’ve written here. Nonetheless, I will borrow Spiegelman’s defense, and write “I’m just trying to portray [my fear] accurately!” (Spiegelman 132). Whether or not that fear matters to you, I can tell myself that at least I’ve done it a little bit of justice.