Grandma's Getting a Twitter: Thoughts on Citizenship in the 21st Century Literary Community

There's a joke in the math department, "The university loves us because we're cheap dates.  All we need is pencil, paper, and a wastebasket.

Of course, they love the philosophy department even more: all they need is pencil and paper."

This illustrates something I love about both my fields of study (terrible jokes aside): simplicity.  One of the many things writers and mathematicians have in common is the age-old simplicity of their craft.  Pythagoras and Plato and Poe all used the same simple tools, the same tools writers and mathematicians continue to use today.

...Or do they?

After accepting the opportunity to intern for this year's Midwest Writers Workshop, along with ten other Ball State students, I began to realize just how much the writing world has changed and developed, even (and especially) during my lifetime.  Imagine my embarrassment when I was singled out, almost immediately, as the only person on the team without a Twitter account.  I was shocked, embarrassed, and immediately mended this error in my prehistoric ways as soon as I got home.  After mastering the "hashtag" and creating my first few "tweets," I felt no small amount of mental backlash at this rude awakening: the writing world had moved beyond my comfort zone, beyond the simple, pen-and-paper lifestyle that I signed up for when I began my journey as a writer.  To even apply for the internship, not only did I have to have a website with my electronic resume instead of a paper resume, I also had to provide evidence of my active use of social media.

This is entirely contrary to what students have been told for years: Don't get a Facebook.  Don't use social media, because employers search through your pictures and may turn you away as a result.  (Lucky for me, my idea of a wild Saturday night is making three different kinds of buffalo wings and eating them inside a blanket fort with a few friends while watching the Lion King, so I've been pretty comfortable having a social media presence for a number of years.)  Now, we're being told that our savvy in social media networking is what gives us an edge in the job market over our more experienced counterparts from the previous generation.  What used to be a bane to our career potential and a distraction from our studies is now an obligation, and is in fact the substance of the work I currently do for my internship. 

Growing up in the information age is both convenient and exhausting.  The worth of a great story seems to inflate, as more and more links on newsfeeds and tweetdeck lists makes new information so overwhelmingly convenient that it's hard to get, and even harder to keep, a reader's attention.  Can you blame stubborn old fogies like myself for our hesitancy in embracing this brave new world of writing platforms and self-promotion?  Joan Didion doesn't have a Twitter, because she dislikes microblogs (for unstated reasons that nonetheless seem obvious to me).  I have to wonder, are we ushering out a certain style and method of writing, without knowing the effects on the future generation of writers as self-promoters? 

A dear friend of mine is currently using a typewriter for his writing projects, because he feels that the method by which art is created affects the resulting art itself.  I whole-heartedly agree, and yet I wonder if any writers once saw the typewriter as a threatening piece of technology, poised to destroy the "right" or "real" method of writing: a pen to a page.

And taking a step even further back, I wonder if the earliest Greek oral poets stuck their noses up at the thought of their verse inscribed on a page, at the idea of destroying the transient beauty of performance, removing the precious temporality of the spoken word and reducing it to a list of figures that can be read and reread a thousand times.  I wonder if seeing their stories preserved on a scroll horrified them, their words removed so far from their vocal chords, bare and vulnerable to any prying eye to prod and question.  

The act of writing, unto itself, is a technological advancement.  To attempt to ignore the development of the blogging, tweeting, hashtagging literary community simply because of a belief in the superiority of "real" writers like Didion is to fool oneself into believing the world of writing is at all separable from the society it inhabits.

A useless question would be, "Should the writing world change to accommodate the desires of this generation and the methods of information age?"  The fact is, the literary community already has and will continue to change and develop within the society that it both affects and reflects.  A better question would be to ask yourself how to find new ways of connecting to this generation in a way that communicates to your readers while still maintaining the integrity of what you believe to be important as a writer.  I believe in the power of ideas to create change and the beauty of words toward healing and understanding. Stepping into this generation and using their communication tools to reach as many minds and hearts as possible need not have the effect of "selling out," nor does it require you to deny your own passions and reasons for writing.  It can even become your Areopagus, your venue from which you can share those passions more effectively with an audience better able to receive that message and pass it on.