Comments on: Twitter Copywriters and the l33terati

By: joealterio

joealterio — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 20:27:04 +0000

Great insight: I feel it in my own prose, a hash of having The Beats foisted upon my early as “The Great Writers” – more fallout of the post-Boomer era? – and bumpersticker brevity that I fight at every turn. I've also often assumed it had something to do with the graphic nature of my profession, essentially speaking in coded rebuses, but perhaps it's deeper than that.

By: Tim Maly

Tim Maly — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 03:06:47 +0000

I sometimes feel like Kurt Vonnegut is the grandfather of the l33terati. With his clipped sentences.

By: Michael Bennett Cohn

Michael Bennett Cohn — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 01:31:34 +0000

I take a slightly more optimistic view. There is indeed a group of people who are trying to do something truly literary with the vocabulary and culture of online media. But the fact that it's such a moving target makes it especially difficult. I can reminisce about what it was like to be part of a local BBS community in 1985, but not only have I changed since then; the whole mode of online communication has changed. Or someone could write a novel in Tweets, but do we really know twitter well enough to do that in a meaningful way? Have we been using it long enough to really have a grip on how it affects us? I suppose that, for the right hand, the answer is yes. But that artist has a lot of muck to fight through before they emerge in the spotlight.

All that said, there is a great story by Rick Moody in the semi-online journal Electric Literature, in which the climax basically takes place in a series of text messages.

By: joanne mcneil

joanne mcneil — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 01:16:32 +0000

So it's from the 60s or earlier! I've spent at least a total of 30 minutes trying to get to the bottom of this but nothing. Why hasn't the hivemind uncovered the original copywriter by now? Metafilter, wikipedia, linkblogs…c'mon!

By: jasonscottsadofsky

jasonscottsadofsky — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:53:56 +0000

In the 1969 Firesign Theater album “How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All”, there's a sequence at the beginning where someone hops into a car and other members say (with a doppler effect) the text of signs. One of them is “Shadow Valley Condoms – If you lived here you’d be home by now.”