Twitter’s Influence on Today’s Writing.

Twitter is known as one of the most frequently used social medias in the world today. In most cases it is very rare for people and especially celebrities to not be on twitter. I read an article by Thomas Beller which was in The New Yorker and was titled “The Ongoing Story: Twitter and Writing”. In this article Beller discusses his views on twitter and how after he used it, his views changed. According to Beller he defines a tweet as a violation of one’s privacy, and viewed them as “public thoughts that would otherwise be private”. He compared this to how authors do their creative work privately and how this caused a disruption in the writing process because twitter was so different an often uncensored and very public. He believed tweets took away the creativity and individualism in writing. However, as the article went on, Beller described his experience with twitter as exciting and very similar to writing. He at first viewed it as a good starting idea for writing and only saw it as that, or for “career building”, but later saw it as a creative way of showing your work or building conversations with your audience. Beller realized because of this new technology and the culture that was created by it that writing was different. Instead of avoiding it, he decided to try and embrace this new technology and use it to improve the use and the process of writing. From the perspective of Brian Winston, Bellers article and the idea of twitter would be an example of technological determinism. How twitter, the new technology, was made and is being used effected the culture and the idea of writing. Because of twitter, today people are more willing to express their opinions and pieces of work more freely and openly. Another way twitter influenced the culture was by encouraging and giving people the opportunity to speak their minds. I definitely agree with Beller’s attitude on twitter and it being labeled as technological determinism. Our culture is what it is today because technologies like twitter allowed us to experiment and explore the opportunities they provide.