Sites of uncertainty

Abstract

With a starting point in three examples of Twitter stories by the German director Florian Meimberg, this article argues that literary fiction in Twitter newsfeeds allows us to reflect on how we read Twitter newsfeeds in general, as well as how narratives such as Meimberg’s are in dialogue with the reading modes of the media platform that facilitates their production and distribution. Through a method of contextual close reading the article explores how these stories generate sites of uncertainty by disrupting the newsfeed reading flow and creating awareness of the gaps within texts that ‘speak’ to us and the gaps between unrelated texts that do not necessarily ‘speak’ to us. It argues that the literary tweets become part of an on-going negotiation of causality and temporality at work in large dynamic digital sites such as Twitter. In this way the stories are simultaneously part of and challenge the current cultural conditions of information processing and archiving.