Abstract
Twitter, synonymous with social networking, has become a successful social platform for the exchange of ideas, news, and information. It has also emerged as an experimental platform through which users explore creative realms of poetic and narrative content, albeit in 140 characters. The real-time tweets are fundamentally unique and increasingly sophisticated. The attention deficit generation of the fast-paced contemporary world has little time on its hands for extended discourse. Brief stories have been told throughout human history, however, the popularity of short stories skyrocketed with the advent of digital story telling. Twitter has now become a frontier medium that allows a unique mode of digital storytelling that facilitates creative literary experimentation. Twitter offers a unique freedom to writers insofar as a tweet can be an entire bite-sized story or even a snapshot of a story that requires readers’ active imagination to complete. Twitter fiction signifies stylistic word economy, compactness, symbolic structure, and implied narrative. Fragmentariness of the story is a marker of Twitter fiction. The proponents of Twitter fiction enjoy the originality, freedom, and diversity of perspectives offered by the Twitter fiction. Critics, however, argue that the mandated 140 character limitation stunts story development and strangulates creativity. This paper examines Twitter fiction and proposes that limited characters stories are the evolutionary answer to the reduced attention span of the tech-savvy generation. Keywords: twitterature, fiction, brevity, literary art
Highlights
The phenomenal growth of social media in the twenty-first century owes itself to the ubiquitous presence of the Internet and the platform it offers to keep users engaged and entertained for hours on end
This paper examines Twitter fiction—stories told in 140 characters or less—and discusses how literary art is redefined in the digital age in a manner that resonates with readers with little time to spare or with short attention spans
Is creativity restricted by a limited character count? Is it possible that the great novel or poem may consist of a collection of tweets? Can readers actively take part in the development of a story? These questions can be answered by reviewing the stories that currently abound the Internet
Summary
The phenomenal growth of social media in the twenty-first century owes itself to the ubiquitous presence of the Internet and the platform it offers to keep users engaged and entertained for hours on end. One such platform is Twitter, originally launched in 2006 to connect small groups through a restricted 140 characters short message service (SMS). Twitter users stay updated with the most recent news or gossip directly from their phones during commercial breaks and even while waiting at the stoplights. The phenomenal popularity of Twitter is based on two user behaviors: those who follow others and those who have followers (Rudin, 2011). This paper examines Twitter fiction—stories told in 140 characters or less—and discusses how literary art is redefined in the digital age in a manner that resonates with readers with little time to spare or with short attention spans
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