What is an Experimental Twitter Essay?
@jackinessity explains her oddest invention
On June 3rd, I was riding the Jefferson Lines bus from Fargo, North Dakota, heading home toward San Francisco, California.
I had just left the first ever Misfit: Fargo conference and was still processing a great deal of emotional and intellectual material. I found myself jotting down notes during the bus ride, using my iphoneās note-taking feature:
I went on to compose another short essay, then afterward, discovered that the bus I was on had wifi. I realized that I could tweet the lines of my essay using my iphone. I liked the idea of breaking it into pieces and using a hashtag, #outoftheattic, to thematically tie the whole piece together.
Hashtags on twitter allow the tweets to be searched using whatever the tweets are tagged with, so that a search for #outoftheattic will bring up only tweets that have been sent out with that tag:
The idea was that I would tweet the lines of the essay in reverse, so that theoretically, if someone were to search for the #outoftheattic tag, they would be able to read the essay in order. I donāt know that anyone but me has actually *done* this, but I found it to be a fun way to go about it.
After I got home, I assembled the tweets using photoshop into something that can be printed to a single page, or enlarged into a poster. I also clean up a few mistakes or out-of-order tweets, and get rid of excess clutter. The finished product looks like this:
And thatās an experimental twitter essay. Yay.
I have now completed two in the series, the one pictured above, and another about World Domination Summit 2013.
