I'm new to this. Before now, I have used hashtags only on Facebook and only rarely.
VERY rarely. In fact, I have viewed hashtags and their ilk with a certain amount of disgust and skepticism.
I am increasingly realizing that I am not a "techie" but am actually a bit technophobic. I don't jump on the technological bandwagons very fast. This year, in fact, is the first time I have ever bought a brand-new computer. It figures that it would need repairs less than five months after I bought it when EVERY OTHER USED COMPUTER I have EVER used has lasted approximately 2+ years with no major issues.
Sorry. Tangent.
Alright. Let me approach this from a different angle. It is a seemingly unrelated angle, but I promise that I do have a point.
I just finished reading The Blatchford Controversies and all of the Father Brown mysteries by G.K. Chesterton this week. At first, they seem hugely different: The Blatchford Controversies are four essays about Christianity as opposed to Rationalism, while the Father Brown mysteries are short stories about a short, round priest who solves mysteries in his spare time--and quite a varied arrangement of mysteries they are! In total, I have read 993 pages about murders, thefts, vendettas, lies, peculiar puzzles, and oddities in the last three weeks.
It seems like there is quite a difference between The Blatchford Controversies and the Father Brown mysteries, correct? Well, on the surface, yes--but I can name two major similarities that tie them together. First, they are short works (essays/short stories). Second, they are about mankind and the Fall into sin, which fundamentally links them together and practically makes them into a series about the same thing. Brilliant.
But, then again, G.K. Chesterton was indeed brilliant.
However, the fact that I am being asked to use Twitter for a college class right on the heels of reading G.K. Chesterton, of all people, brings the very nature of writing into question. What is information and what is worth sharing with the world? I think that brilliant thinkers of the past and the modern man would have very different definitions of these concepts--and I am not convinced that we have the right of it today.
One thing that I was thinking the entire time that I was reading the Father Brown mysteries--all in as quick a succession as I could--was that the very nature of short stories is disjointed. You see, I like novels. I love novels because I get an in-depth understanding of a world, of the setting, of the structural setup of the government or moral system, and, of course, of the characters. Often, novels deal with the growth and maturation of characters and the development of conflicts. I love that. Everything feels seamless, and if a novel is really well-written, I feel like I am being gifted not with an entire story or entire life, but a section of a time in a far-off place. The length of the story only adds to my enjoyment of and investment in the story [if it is done well].
I have, of course, read books and series which are clearly too long. Christopher Paolini's Inheritance series is an example. By the end, I felt that we were given far too much information and too much ending so that everything was wrapped up so well that even the reader couldn't imagine anything important happening in the future. Either that, or we are too bored and overloaded to care.
But short stories are a different breed entirely. To go back to the Father Brown mysteries, I struggled mightily with the format of the short story form for quite a while. I would read a story, finish it, and then--move on to something different. I realized this pretty early on, and it is easy to find out what caused the disjointedness: the short story itself. I might start reading on page 1, the story finishes on page 23, and there is a new short story that begins on page 24. Guess where I am likely to stop reading for the evening? Page 23, of course. I am generally a speed-reader and can read a 400-page YA novel in a day. However, I have found it nearly impossible to read Chesterton short stories at the same rate because the everlasting tendency is to read in chunks, and when the chunks are laid out so easily in the form of story endings, it's hard to read a bunch of beginnings and endings seamlessly.
Now, I initially thought that that was a bad thing. I don't like feeling like I can't keep my train of thought. However, after thinking more about the novelty of being unable to read short stories like the Father Brown mysteries back to back, I realized that perhaps this disjointedness may possibly be a good thing--in some situations. For instance, G.K. Chesterton was incredibly gifted at putting profound concepts into little bits of information, and he structured his stories so that a reader could get a certain bit of information in about 20 pages and then would (very naturally) stop, do something else, and ruminate about the story in the meantime. To read the stories back-to-back like I tried to do would actually destroy the impact of the story.
Of course, being an unwise college student, I had checked out the Father Brown Omnibus from the library, which meant that I had a due date to which I had to adhere. Furthermore, I am rather peculiar in that I like to keep a book journal and am rather obsessed with finishing nearly EVERYTHING that I start to read, so it was a point of personal pride to finish reading 993 pages of short stories in less than three weeks. As such, I finished doing so, even continuing to read as much as possible while struggling with the influenza--but, on the other hand, I did blatantly disregard the point of the short story structure.
Let's focus a little more. The short story, with all its faults (it does necessarily eliminate the fluidity and comprehensive approach that a novel has, after all), is still a mostly coherent and comprehensible whole story. I may require 993 pages of short stories about the same character to even come close to understanding him and his world, but the short story may still be a self-contained story.
On the other hand, we are moving with ever-increasing speed toward a full acceptance of incomplete story structures. (See, I told you I had a point!) To get back to the topic on hand, I have been a relatively frequent user of Facebook for the last several years and have just gotten onto Twitter last week. What I have noticed, though, is that neither one of these social media sites is even capable of creating a coherent story. We have lost the story in our lives.
Let me say that again: WE HAVE LOST THE STORY IN OUR LIVES.
This is not a new thought, and it is not unique to me. I have heard of it from others and have read about it. But it is still true. If you look with a discerning eye at social media like Facebook and Twitter, what will you notice? Well, that despite the fact that we seem to be posting every inconsequential detail of our lives for the whole world to see, there is no element of a story. We do not often see even simple stories on social media websites.
So what DO we see? Well, we learn that Jane went to the store and got milk, Peter stayed at home and played video games, John went to work and was bored, George was sick, Anne got a new cat, and Susan read a good book. We also learn that Jake went to class, that Ellie was sad, that Pam broke up with her boyfriend, and that Lewis slept until 10:30 and missed his bus.
Do you see what I am getting at? There is no sense of a story. All of these bits of detail are just that--bits. On a news feed, we read these bits of information and barely spare a thought to them because, even if Anne writes three posts about her new cat and comes even marginally close to actually telling a story (horrors!), chances are that these posts will be split up by the totally unrelated facts about Jane's trip to the store and Lewis's missed class. And we don't really notice because we don't really care a whole lot, do we?
So what that means is that even if we read two hundred posts about our ten closest friends' private lives, chances are that we won't actually get to know them much better. We don't know The Story of their lives (those words are not capitalized in vain), so we don't really know our friends at all. That can only come from actual contact with them, right? So maybe social media really doesn't have much of a point at all, or, at the very least, it doesn't fulfill its original purpose--to help us tell our stories. And how much can we really know our own stories without understanding others' stories as well? Doesn't the very idea of story come from relationship?
Well, I'm finally back to Twitter. Twitter, in my mind, exacerbates the problem. Even Facebook doesn't create a sense of disjointedness quite as deliberately as Twitter does. How dare I say that? Well, Twitter imposes a strict restriction of 140 characters per post, if memory serves rightly. 140 characters. You can't tell a story in 140 characters, and you sure can't tell it in a set of posts of 140 characters each. Good luck if you try--because you are not the only person your audience is following. If you try telling the story of your life on Twitter, you will probably end up being benignly interrupted by a host of other posts about others' lives. Of course, most people have probably figured this out already, which is why what I have seen of Twitter is filled with links and hashtags and things that attempt to create a greater story. But you know what? I think that even these measures are doomed to failure. If you are inundated with 20 brand new Twitter posts in the last two hours and each one has links and hashtags, you ARE NOT going to follow all of those links to figure out what the overall story being told is. We may be lazy as a human race, but we are also beset by the demands and limits of Time.
Oh, and even if you try to tell your life story with Twitter--even with Facebook--you will be pressured to make it short, quick, and to the point. The emphasis in our information-inundated world is on quick communication (140 characters, remember?). Make it snappy! No one has the time for you! Make it short and fast, and while you're at it, DON'T make us think too hard! The more inconsequential your posts are, the better--because we can read them and then ignore them. Thinking takes time, and we don't have that. That's why we have txtspk--LOL, JK, :), etc. Because not only don't we have the time to read and digest, we don't have the time to write and communicate.
:'(
Given all this depressing information, what are social media websites good for? In particular, what is Twitter good for--especially in the world of libraries and school libraries? Well, what I highly recommend is that we encourage our community members to reclaim narrative in their lives by creating strong personal relationships. And, of course, we can help do this by encouraging our social media followers to visit our libraries and learn about Story from books, essays, and short stories, to name just a few. We can begin by advertising--within 140 characters, of course!--our new materials and the events we host at our libraries. Because once people venture into our libraries, the world is THEIRS. The world is the oyster of each and every library patron who realizes the impossible preciousness of relationship and narrative...and we can use even story-crushing social media websites to share the world with our drowning community.
Because that is the reason we are here.
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