Twitter vs. Story

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Did I just discover a new form of writing — where paragraphs are separated not just by space but by a horizontal line? I don’t know. We’ll see.

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I’ve been writing versions of the “About” text for Keeam — for about a year and half already. Never satisfied with the result. At some point, I started dividing the text into several parts with horizontal lines in between. That felt somehow better.

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Today, I finally divided the text into multiple parts separated by horizontal lines. That felt even better. I was going into something good. Then came the realization — the text started looking like a series of tweets.

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Ok now… a little history — in 1993, I wrote a paper arguing for a “field” discourse replacing “disciplines” — and published it a decade later on my blog.

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In 2011, Jeff Jarvis disciplined me into restating my thesis simply… So I wrote …

“It’s high time to accept and accommodate for the passing of cultural forms (think books) that…
1. Take pieces of past experiences and structure them into “stories”
2. Intend to be useful (in some pre-ordained view of the world)
3. Submit to a single idea (or a coherent cluster of ideas)
4. Try to translate/“print” transitory experience into permanent knowledge
5. Try to suggest certainty
6. Try to suggest a single ultimate point of view/origin/authority.”

Now I realize that those 6 points were my “Anti-Story Manifesto”.

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So instead of taking “…pieces of past experiences and structure them into stories” — what should we do? I never came around to answer the question. Until today… may be. We’ll see.

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Take pieces of past and present experiences and write them as pieces. Separated by horizontal lines. Not like a story. Like tweets.

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The “twitter feed” in-forming back the “article”… #orsomethinglikethat.

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This was first published on Keeam.