ROCHEFOUCAULDIAN INTERLUDE

Thoughts on the Fluid Dynamics of Twitter Lit

Rochefoucauldian Interlude

For a cyber writer in Twitter lit land, to react to a tweet—to like, comment, or retweet it, or do nothing—can be a decision of such social import that Edith Wharton could have written whole novels about it. For just as a matrix of unspoken rules dictated the activities of upper class New York society in the Gilded Age (whether to respond to an invitation with a snub, how long to stay at the residence of one’s social betters on an afternoon call, what sort of person to talk to on the sidewalk), a series of directives and calculations meets the practitioner of literary Twitter presented with a tweet. Shifting metaphors to a more proletarian setting, the eddy and flow of attention can be redirected to the right eyes by constructing dams, recirculating favorable waters back upstream several yards to be seen again by fishers who may have missed the trout on the first pass.

It’s understood that the powers of Twitter for self-promoting a writer’s career will be maximized as much as possible. When the blessed day of publication arrives, when one’s poem or story or essay is published by this or that outfit, the expected thing is that a writer will full-throatedly retweet the announcement of this (usually with a “quote retweet” drafted with varying degrees of perceptive humility) so that all of his or her followers can see it, celebrate it, and feel the twinges of envy or happiness according to how their own tuning fork is oriented. For to be sure, if an alert of literary good fortune is not reflected back by one’s peers, if not enough people notice—or if the wrong people notice—it can undermine the positive notes one does receive. Vanity is threatened by the wrong type of attention. It takes time to learn the landscape: where you are and where you want to go, who is important and whose interaction is especially prized, who has a lot of followers and therefore whose retweets are especially consequential, vs. who has fewer followers but whose society is craved because they are more authentic and less tapped-in to the machine of Twitter honor. Low follower numbers can be chalked up to many explanations, some nefarious, some merely that people didn’t want to “play the game,” which commands a certain kind of nobility. On some level, everybody recognizes this is all awful and corrosive to the spirit—and yet millions dive into the sewer daily in hopes of finding a crown.

Tagging other writers in your tweets is a delicate balancing act because while everyone loves notifications, the wrong kinds of notifications can be as abrasive as the loud voice at the party calling your name, calling you over to a group of people you wanted to avoid. Getting your Twitter handle listed in a #ff or “Follow Friday” roster (“support these fellow writers in the community!”) can sometimes in the wrong light lead to days of unwanted, tiresome notifications that let you down—alerts that do nothing for you because they pertain to a crowd of others outside your schemes—because you were expecting other, more substantial signals from other, more substantial sources: the dream notification that releases a stream of dopamine straight into the cortex.

The sometimes hazy, sometimes rigid boundaries between cliques and sub-cliques on literary Twitter (and presumably in artistic Twitter, pottery Twitter, karate Twitter, etc) can be inferred from analyzing the avalanche of handles in a single “support these writers” tweet. Seeing an incongruous name among a group can raise eyebrows as surely as spotting an upstart social climber or rebel among the dancers at ball would have done in 19th century France or England or Russia. Lack of adherence to staying within these clique-boundaries can be ascribed to one’s dashing originality or individuality—or to one’s fecklessness. New social arrangements swirl into being by design or by accident, but always to the benefit of the cunning and the detriment of those who could not seize the moment. The wash of names and tweets takes on the quality of divine gossip to be sifted and analyzed through a smartphone-shaped sieve of fame.

You get an alert that someone followed you and you wonder why they would add their name to the pile. You say a little oath to yourself that you will make it worth the while of the new follower, knowing that until they bring something to you—likes, comments, retweets—you will probably forget that they exist.

Occasions for flattery on Twitter arrive with the regularity of city buses, seized on by a determined class of workmanlike passengers trying to get ahead. Writers ensnare the attention of other writers by reciting their poems, singing hymns of praise, appeals to vanity are made and the gift basket is rarely returned to sender. Twitter transforms artists into lobbyists.