There’s also the problem of linkrot. The ever-shifting Wikipedia page suggests that Tim Berners-Lee was the first person to warn against these constantly changing links. Some extremely lazy excavation reveals that Jakob Nielsen was on the case on June 14, 1998, pointing, with unintentional and unanticipated irony, to “a recent survey by Terry Sullivan’s All Things Web.” But the link today is no longer good. I consult The Wayback Machine, waiting a few patient minutes for some hopeful snapshot of the Sullivan site in question, getting a total of 91 versions between 1998 and 2008. And of course, a click to one of these surrogate McCarthy functions takes another 40 seconds, and I don’t know which version is even the optimal one. And I find dramatic differences between the last version of the site in 2008 and the first version of the site in 1998. To name just one modification, the 2008 version reveals that the survey was conducted in April 1997. I am directed to the actual survey, which thankfully still maintains its original URL. But for how long?) There is no such date in the 1998 version. The 2008 version compares three State of the Web surveys. But what if we want to know what Terry Sullivan wrote about the original survey in 1998? The new page gives no indication that Sullivan changed the page and doesn’t address us to an older version. (I should point out that the Guardian has, And if you try and call up All Things Web in Firefox 3.5.2, you get a 403 error. What was once public is now private or “down for maintenance” (as of August 9, 2009, 9:13 PM EST). Nielsen has referenced only general details in his piece, as well as the original URL, which the patient types will attempt to extract through the Wayback Machine.

But let’s say that Nielsen had used something like tr.im to point to Sullivan. Would we be able to conduct this experiment? Instead of having 91 versions of Sullivan’s website to examine, we’d have to perform some guesswork, assuming the page was referenced by others and assuming that this was the only page in which Sullivan wrote about the “recent survey” in 1998.

Let’s also consider that all of the content and all of the links that we type into Twitter (or, for that matter, a webmail service) involves relying on a third-party website. A third-party website that has been prone to outages, lost tweets, lost followers, and lost information. What steps then is Twitter taking to ensure that all of the data generated at a historical moment is preserved? What are the URL shorteners doing to ensure that the regular versions of URLs are preserved?

Five years from now, will anyone investigating the manner in which CNN and The New York Times relied on Twitter for its news about recent events in Iran be able to check the original data that these ostensible reporters relied on? Will these reporters keep any notes they generated? Will their links still be good? Will the New York Time’s links still be around? (Hell, will the New York Times even still be around?)

Our cavalier refusal to ask these questions only exacerbates the problem of linkrot. There are thankfully methods of backing up your Twitter data, but how many Twitter users will even do this? We are forced by necessity to shorten the links, but “abuse of the service” may cause it to be temporarily disabled. Bit.ly helpfully offers a “history” of recently shortened links. And it even tracks the URLs that you’ve recently shortened even if you’ve never signed up or signed in. But days later, the history is cleared.

Just for fun, I performed an advanced Twitter search on all uses of “bit.ly” on Twitter through February 28, 2009. “No results for bit.ly until:2009-02-28.” I know this cannot be. But let’s give Twitter the benefit of the doubt. All uses of “tinyurl” on Twitter through February 28, 2009? “No results for tinyurl until:2009-02-28.”

These search results are, as anyone who has used Twitter and URL shorteners in the past two years, outright wrong. Twitter lacks the resources to preserve our data from six months ago. How can we expect it to preserve our data six months from now? In our great rush to adopt tools of change, our failure to backup the data we’ve already generated is the Internet’s equivalent to the explosive silver nitrate film stock and reckless cataloging that has permitted only 10 to 15% of silent movies to survive, with the remainder thought to be lost forever. (And who knows if there will be some online answer to Carl Bennett?)

But then many of the prospective answers to these questions depend on how much we value the services we’re using, and just how much we’re willing to waste our weekends on a desperate effort at tenuous restitution.

Technology

Many people are only just waking up to how blurred web technology has made the boundaries between public and private. It used to be easy to know what a public statement was. It was one written for a newspaper or for a radio or television broadcast. But the web has made it harder to discern what is meant to be public and what private. A huge number of people now read newspapers only on the web, alongside other web windows like Facebook, Twitter and blogs. This equalises the difference between the two, it potentially places a Facebook status entry on the same level as the headline of the foreign affairs section of the New York Times. Simply on the basis of visual appearance, on your screen, there is no difference between the might and authority of a comment in the New York Times, and a note written in a blog run from the proverbial bedroom.

So it becomes hard, as a reader, to measure the degree of intent behind any statement one reads — and as a writer, it becomes hard to judge how seriously one’s words are going to be taken and how large the audience for them will be.

How to review a book

Mr. Crain reviewed my book for The New York Times on Sunday 28th June, 2009. The book was accorded a full page review, a relatively rare honour, and was the third review to run in the pecking order. In other words, this was a prestigious slot in the most prestigious paper in the largest book market on the planet. The power of the New York Times in the world of books can’t be overestimated. A review in the paper can close down a book or make its fortunes. With books pages being cut right across the world, it remains the authoritative place for information.

Given this power, the onus on any reviewer is to use it wisely, a wisdom to which there is no finer guide than John Updike and as laid out in his collection Picked Up Pieces. Updike’s concern was for fairness. This did not mean that he wanted every book to be praised. Rather, he wanted every book to be given it’s ‘fair due’. The end of a fair appraisal might mean the book was not recommended, but the author and reader could feel that the reviewer had kept his or her side of the bargain. Updike recommended that the reviewer try to understand what the author was up to, enter imaginatively into the project, and most of all avoid any kind of attack that felt ad hominem.

In last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, Caleb Crain reviewed Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. While regular NYTBR watchers like Levi Asher welcomed the spirited dust-up, even Asher remained suspicious about Crain’s doubtful assertions and dense prose.

But on Sunday, de Botton left numerous comments at Crain’s blog, writing, “I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.”

As Carolyn Kellogg would later remark, this apparent enmity didn’t match up with the sweet and patient man she had observed at an event. While de Botton hadn’t posted anybody’s phone number or email address, as Alice Hoffman had through her Twitter account, de Botton had violated an unstated rule in book reviewing: Don’t reply to your critics.

But the recent outbursts of Hoffman, de Botton, and (later in the week) Ayelet Waldman — who tweeted, “The book is a feminist polemic, you ignorant twat” (deleted but retweeted by Freda Moon) in response to Jill Lepore’s New Yorker review — have raised some significant questions about whether an author can remain entirely silent in the age of Twitter. Is Henrik Ibsen’s epistolary advice to Georg Brandes (”Look straight ahead; never reply with a word in the papers; if in your writings you become polemical, then do not direct your polemic against this or that particular attack; never show that a word of your enemies has had any effect on you; in short, appear as though you did not at all suspect that there was any opposition.”) even possible in an epoch in which nearly every author can be contacted by email, sent a direct message through Twitter, or texted by cell phone?

I contacted de Botton to find out what happened. I asked de Botton if he had indeed posted the comments on Crain’s blog. He confirmed that he had, and he felt very bad about his outburst. I put forth some questions. Not only was he extremely gracious with his answers, but he also offered a related essay. Here are his answers:

First off, did you and Caleb Crain have any personal beefs before this brouhaha went down? You indicated to me that you found your response counterproductive and daft. I’m wondering if there were mitigating factors that may have precipitated your reaction.

I have never met Mr. Crain and had no pre-existing views. The great mitigating factor is that I never believed I would have to answer for my words before a large audience. I had false believed that this was basically between him and me.

What specifically did you object to in Crain’s review? What specifically makes the review “an almost manic desire to bad-mouth and perversely depreciate anything of value?”

My goal in writing The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work was to shine a spotlight on the sheer range of activities in the working world from a feeling that we don’t recognise these well enough. And part of the reason for this lies with us writers. If a Martian came to earth today and tried to understand what humans do from just reading most literature published today, he would come away with the extraordinary impression that all people spend their time doing is falling in love, squabbling with their families — and occasionally, murdering one another. But of course, what we really do is go to work…and yet this ‘work’ is rarely represented in art. It does appear in the business pages of newspapers, but then, chiefly as an economic phenomenon, rather than as a broader ‘human’ phenomenon. So to sum up, I wanted to write a book that would open our eyes to the beauty, complexity, banality and occasional horror of the working world — and I did this by looking at 10 different industries, a deliberately eclectic range, from accountancy to engineering, from biscuit manufacture to logistics. I was inspired by the American children’s writer Richard Scarry, and his What do people do all day? I was challenged to write an adult version of Scarry’s great book.

The review of the book seemed almost willfully blind to this. It suggested that I was uninterested in the true dynamics of work, that I was interested rather in patronising and insulting people who had jobs and that I was mocking anyone who worked. There is an argument in the book that work can sometimes be demeaning and depressing — hence the title: Pleasures AND Sorrows. But the picture is meant to be balanced. On a number of occasion, I stress that a lot of your satisfaction at work is dependent on your expectations. There are broadly speaking two philosophies of work out there. The first you could call the working-class view of work, which sees the point of work as being primarily financial. You work to feed yourself and your loved ones. You don’t live for your work. You work for the sake of the weekend and spare time — and your colleagues are not your friends necessarily. The other view of work, very different, is the middle class view, which sees work as absolutely essential to a fulfilled life and lying at the heart of our self-creation and self-fulfilment. These two philosophies always co-exist but in a recession, the working class view is getting a new lease of life. More and more one hears the refrain, ‘it’s not perfect, but at least it’s a job…’ All this I tried to bring out with relative subtlety and care. As I said, Mr. Crain saw fit to describe me merely as someone who hated work and all workers.

Caleb Crain’s blog post went up on Sunday. You responded to Crain on a Monday (New York time). You are also on Twitter. When you responded, were you aware of Alice Hoffman’s Twitter meltdown (where she
posted a reviewer’s phone number and email address) and the subsequent condemnation of her actions?

I was not aware.

Under what circumstances do you believe that a writer should respond to a critic? Don’t you find that such behavior detracts from the insights contained within your books?

I think that a writer should respond to a critic within a relatively private arena. I don’t believe in writing letters to the newspaper. I do believe in writing, on occasion, to the critics directly. I used to believe that posting a message on a writer’s website counted as part of this kind of semi-private communication. I have learnt it doesn’t, it is akin to starting your own television station in terms of the numbers who might end up attending.

You suggested that Crain had killed your book in the United States with his review. Doesn’t this overstate the power of the New York Times Book Review? Aren’t you in fact giving the NYTBR an unprecedented amount of credit in a literary world in which newspaper book review sections are, in fact, declining? There’s a whole host of readers out there who don’t even look at book review sections. Surely, if your book is good, it will find an audience regardless of Crain’s review. So why give him power like that?

The idea that if a book is good, it will find an audience regardless is a peculiar one for anyone involved in the book industry. There are thousands of very good books published every year, most are forgotten immediately. The reason why the publishing industry invests heavily in PR and marketing (the dominant slice of the budget in publishing houses goes to these departments) is precisely because the idea of books ‘naturally’ finding an audience isn’t true. Books will sink without review coverage, which is why authors and publishers care so acutely about them — and why there is a quasi moral responsibility on reviewers to exercise good judgement and fairness in what they say.

The outlets that count when publishing serious books are: an appearance on NPR, a review in the New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review. There are of course some other outlets, but they pale into insignificance besides these three outlets. Of the three, the New York Times Book Review remains the most important.

Hence I don’t for a moment over-estimate the importance of Mr Crain’s review. He was holding in his hands the tools that could make or break the result of two to three years of effort. You would expect that holding this sort of responsibility would make a sensible person adhere a little more closely to Updike’s six golden rules.

In the wake of Updike’s death, partly as a tribute to him, my recommendation is that newspapers all sign up to a voluntary code for the reviewing of books. This will help authors certainty, but most importantly it will help readers to find their way more accurately towards the sort of literature they’ll really enjoy.

If you were to travel back in time on Sunday morning and you had two sentences that you could tell yourself before leaving the comment, what would those two sentences be?

Put this message in an envelope, not on the internet.

To paraphrase Eleanor Roosevelt, nobody can make you feel inauthentic without your consent. And the phony who uttered the onerous words recorded by the good and kind Don Linn should be whacked in the kneecaps. Just so the phony can decide whether or not there is indeed a metric that can be applied while excruciating pain shoots through legs I realize that these are strong words, but they are necessary ones, I think. If you cannot feel and you wish to advocate emotional capitulation, then you have no business being an expert or speaking before a crowd. For there is no strategy for living. Life simply doesn’t work that way. It isn’t a matter of taking in and emitting anthracite deposits of objective data. If you really need some hokey maxim to start with, life is what happens when you make other plans. But why settle for Werner Erhard-like comforts? If you can pretend that you know what you’re doing and you can improvise around the mad anarchy on your own terms and truly appreciate other people in the process, then you’ll probably get a lot farther than those foolishly pursuing “the metrics to assess whether you are successful.” Twitter can neither help you live better nor transform you into a better person. Like any helpful tool, it can enhance your life and direct you to the right people and permit you to exchange sound ideas and giddy concepts with people who are excited. But it is no replacement for real life. Nor is it landscape to be carved up by the avaricious marketing people. Ten conferences or twenty boot camps couldn’t possibly tell you how to stick with a vision and connect with others who have similar ambitions. Twitter, Facebook, Augmented Reality, and the flashiest technological tool shooting off the tip of your tongue can’t possibly help you understand why that person across from you is lighting up and smiling and getting excited. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to summon forth that same energy in yourself, find common ground, and make that passion happen, and make the passion of others happen. If Twitter can get you there, that’s fantastic. But what are you saying to the world when you tint your Twitter photo green instead of summoning up an original thought about Iran? How authentic — whether strategically authentic or genuinely authentic — are you when you’re so determined to run with the herd?

On a lighter (and possibly more disgraceful) note, here’s another interview I did with the good Austin Allen of The Abbeville Manual of Style. I do have a plan to save the publishing industry and it involves loganberry mint juleps.

Dear @MyFriend:

You unfollowed me on Twitter today, and I simply haven’t been the same. There are salty beads of sweat slithering and agitating the angry furrows of my aging forehead and my left testicle has just popped out of my boxers. I am considering switching back to briefs, but I don’t think this will help. And I don’t think any of this will encourage you to follow me again on Twitter. But I must tell you the truth. Because you are, in no small sense, responsible for all this. I bought some fresh glue from a Duane Reade so that I’d have a new habit to take up. Something to help me through the sadness. But nothing can distract me from the dismal truth. Forget the economic upheaval. Thanks to Twitter, I now have some inkling of how David Kellerman felt. I wonder how many followers he had when things got bad for him. My guess is that you would not have unfollowed David Kellerman if you knew that he was on edge. I don’t know if I’m on edge, but the glue sure is helping. And I’d probably do the same thing that David Kellerman did, but I’m too cowardly and too lazy to hang myself right now.

All this is your fault. I followed you, knowing then that you had around 700 followers, some of whom were following me. When I followed you, I thought you might eventually follow me, and that the two of us might follow each other for life. It would be like a marriage. We’d be committing to each other, but we wouldn’t have to live with each other or cook or clean or shout at each other or eventually pay alimony. I retweeted your posts, figuring you would eventually see that I was fond of you and hoping all the while that you would follow me right back. And sure enough, you decided to follow me when you had around 925 followers.

Well, I was quite impressed. And to show my appreciation for your act of kindness in a prominent social network, I believe I bought you a beer once, or maybe it just happened to be another person who had your name. (You know Twitter. After a while, you see the fail whale everywhere.) We may have felt each other up in a broom closet at some point. Who knows for sure? But we definitely had some fun, if it was indeed you. The real details aren’t important. What’s important is the pithy bits of significance we express online. The problem, of course, is just how well we know each other or whether this whole Twitter thing even begins to encapsulate anything close to the social experience.

But now I know that it doesn’t. Because you unfollowed me. And if social networks actually mattered, then this cruel act would never have occurred. Now I don’t know if I can approach Twitter the same way. Because you have unfollowed me, I cannot DM you to clear up this misunderstanding. I am here by my computer, begging you by email to follow me again. To consider my emotional well-being over your organizational convenience. I mean, I simply don’t understand why you follow someone like @stephenfry, but not me. It’s not that I’m as smart as @stephenfry. But @stephenfry doesn’t tweet nearly as much as I do. And I’m more inclined to @reply you. Has @stephenfry ever @replied you? You see, I have. And while I may not have @stephenfry’s clever wit and conversational acumen, wasn’t there some small solace in knowing that someone was out there @replying to you?

Perhaps you’re one of those fools who believe that Twitter isn’t the center of the universe. Or maybe you’ve fallen asleep right now and you’ve lost your grip on the bottle of Pilsner Urquel and it’s all dribbled down your loud Hawaiian shirt. (I also feel uncomfortable using your first name or assuming that these biographical details are true, but what else do I have to go by other than your tweets? These details came from tweets that you posted, respectively, “8 hours ago,” “1 month ago,” and “3 months ago.” I have carefully studied all of your 1,247 updates.) Maybe I’ll never know you through Twitter. Maybe I’ll never know myself. But surely you must understand that there’s another person at the other end who will eventually figure out that you’ve unfollowed him, and who will spend many hours weeping.

I thought we were friends or, at least, acquaintances. Did you ever really like me? Or was your follow just a put-on? I won’t sleep easy until there’s an explanation. Or maybe you can just send me a check for $6.00 (beer plus tip) to recompense me for the expenses I blew. You were, after all, simply pretending. Or you can just follow me again and we can act as if nothing ever happened. Alternatively, if you know of a good therapist who you can recommend to me — someone who is on Twitter and someone who I can follow — I think you owe me at least a reference under the circumstances. My ethical core is this: I would never unfollow my worst enemy, in large part because I wouldn’t follow him in the first place. You’ve caused me endless emotional distress, confusion, and psychological pain. I wish I could unfollow you right back, but I can’t seem to quit you.

Very truly yours,

Edward Champion

Not less than 24 hours after the news of Donald E. Westlake’s death was broken by the New York Times’s Jennifer 8. Lee, Grand Central (Westlake’s publisher) has seen fit to flood Twitter with endless retweets of what others have written about Donald E. Westlake, while simultaneously promoting Westlake’s final novel, Get Real.

How would you like it if some huckster was trying to sell you something while you were attending a funeral? In all likelihood, you would punch the huckster in the face. Unfortunately, Grand Central can’t be punched in the face through Twitter.

Adding insult to injury, @GrandCentralPub has been offering a retweet every one or two minutes, polluting all of the collective tweets. So when one searches for “Westlake,” one now has to sift through endless garbage promulgated by the Grand Central people. These “marketing efforts” not only deface Twitter’s community with crude spam, but they are exceptionally crass and highly insensitive towards the feelings of those who loved and revered Donald E. Westlake.

Other publishers, such as Soft Skull and Algonquin Books, have actively engaged with other people on Twitter, participating in conversations but without any prolific marketing efforts. But Grand Central Publishing simply doesn’t get it. Grand Central lacks the maturity and the understanding to view Twitterers as human beings and apparently perceives you as unthinking consumerist sheep. Because of this, I strongly urge all fellow Twitterers to block and unfollow Grand Central. If Grand Central can’t sit at the grown ups table, they need to be relegated to the kid’s room where their base and tacky efforts will be responded to with the appropriate puerile responses.

[UPDATE: For what it's worth, Grand Central has now apologized, although they have interpreted these feelings as "feedback."]

But now that I’ve warmed up to it considerably, I’ve found Twitter to be an essential medium that can be used to collect interesting bits of information and communicate with others. It’s something of a conceptual lab, where everyone can throw around crazy ideas. It’s also a handy way of checking in on friends. Much like Wikipedia, it provides invaluable (and possibly untrue) leads that you can independently corroborate. And when you verify something, you begin to think about it. And when you think about it, you begin to write in some relatively cogent form. Twitter may very well be one of the reasons why my already overactive brain is capable of churning out a livelier conceptual stew. (In cases like this, where concepts often threaten to dislodge the noggin, I find it wise to heed ZeFrank’s helpful advice about “brain crack.” Assuming people are using Twitter the way that I am, perhaps Twitter is, in its own way, assisting people in departing from their brain crack.)

Because the medium is communal, and because there are so many tweets that fly across your screen, the power laws controversy that riled up bloggers back in 2003 may not necessarily apply here. I understand that there have been efforts to log the most popular Twitter users, but such exercises miss the point of tweeting. Yes, you’ll find John Cleese, Stephen Fry, Warren Ellis, and Shaquille O’Neal. But since you determine who you follow, you likewise determine how Twitter works for you. You can avoid the charlatans who want to sell you things, the newspapers and websites who spam you with thirty links in three minutes, or the narcissists who want to drag you into the morass. And when someone tweets you out of the blue, you then find another interesting soul to follow or tweet with. Somehow, it all works out. It never becomes too overwhelming. As someone who was around during the early days of blogging, which some have framed as a golden age of possibilities, I find myself having similar thoughts about Twitter. Yes, it will likely become monetized. These mediums always do. But for now, enjoy it while it lasts. It’s a tool that can work for you.

It is possible to spend too much time on Twitter and get on a mad roll of prolific tweets. With the exception of important political events or live coverage, I try to avoid such exercises out of deference to my followers, who I know are following other people. (I remain quite surprised that apparently some people are interested in what I have to say within 140 characters. You will not find much pith within this barrier.) To negotiate Twitter, one must practice some restraint. Just as one must practice some restraint in relation to the Internet. Because I’ve seen good people go mad. Twitter, like anything, can overrun your brain. And it is vital to think.

But Twitter has also had a positive effect on this blog and my writing in general. I find myself writing slower here and faster on Twitter. Suddenly, the roundups that I’ve generated sometimes seem like extraneous exercises. I’ve become more inclined to go on mad tangents. After all, I’ve already thrown the link around on my Twitter feed. I find myself more enthralled with the long form. More willing to be some kind of half-assed chronicler. Maybe Twitter is just what the blogosphere needed to mature. It’s not so much about who links where. It’s now about the voice, which is what attracted many of us to this medium in the first place.

The folks who run Twitter have found a way of making feeds work for us. Just about any self-respecting geek has long hoped that RSS feeds would catch on. But they haven’t. At least not in the way that the feed founders intended. Mechanisms such as Google Reader, Twitter, and podcasting permit us to visualize and use the feed in a way that makes it work for us.

Having said all this, I don’t see how Twitter can make any money. So many people use it. And there are often regrettable Twitter outages. But there is no Con Ed representative to shout at. If these outages come at times when you need to sift through information, it can feel something close to withdrawal from a drug. Yes, one can plant some of the information into a blog entry. But it doesn’t feel the same. The Twitter interface is very particular.

For now, the great circus carries on, sans advertisements or sponsored links. The truth of the matter is that we’re all waiting for Google to buy it. But in the meantime, many of us can use it and feel that we’re now in the midst of something exciting. Until Paul Boutin writes his premature elegy for Twitter sometime in 2010.

My experience with Twitter has caused me to attempt a shift in direction for this blog. Something akin to what I tried with the Filthy Habits incarnation of this site before I returned back to the quasi-Reluctant voice. I’m going more long-form. I’ll be putting up posts that are around 600 to 1,000 words. Strange essays. Prose exercises. I’ll even review a few things here. Books and movies. Etcetera. I think this website is probably going to be more like a newspaper column than a blog. And I’ll still happily edit anything that people want to send me. But I have no conscious plan other than long-form musings. I’m going to see how this all plays out while I do it. If you’ve liked the short form, well, you can always follow my Twitter feed.

I have Twitter to thank for this wholly unintentional development.

My own Twitter history has taken some twists. For a long time, I was dormant, putting up a tweet every two months or so. I had first attempted to use Twitter as a depository for pithy sentences in the style of David Markson. But this proved to be folly. This form did not serve the function. Then I used Twitter to vent about the personal, figuring that nobody was reading. But this was not the case.

Strange people began following me, seeming to believe that there were pivotal things that I was saying within this form. But now I’ve finally figured out Twitter’s purpose, which is more of the social-informational variety. I Twittered the two conventions and didn’t have to worry about how obvious my observations were. (Of course, as any improv teacher will tell you, what seems obvious to you may not be so obvious to another). I’m using it as a place for strange links. Strange as it may seem, I’m using it to ensure that just about every sentence I write is fueled by emotion.

But, most importantly, I look forward to reading other existential juxtapositions summed up in 140 characters. I’ve seen people come out of hiding because of Twitter, emboldened by a tweet and discovering that they do indeed have something to say about a circumstance. Bloggers and writers who are limited by what they are expected to write do not seem to experience the same concerns writing about other topics. Since we’re all limited to 140 characters, the playing field is level. We’re all limited to brisk declarative sentences galvanized by a steady supply of two-letter and three-letter words. Because of this, the more corporate tweets appear, well, laughably corporate. Of course, I’m sure the corporations will figure out ways to sully Twitter, just as they helped to take some of the fun out of blogging.

But for now, Twitter is not a bad place to check up on those who are swamped by email (and, hell, we all are) or those who don’t answer their phones. I’m certainly not on there all the time. And I’m certainly not advocating a life lived almost exclusively by intertextual communication. Contact with others is too important to the human spirit if you expect it to grow. But Twitter is a nifty technological apparatus offering a number of helpful ways to connect with others while learning more about the unexpected niceties of your first instinct.

I must likewise confess about my own confessions. In the early years of this blog, when I had a day job, about 90% of the posts were composed on the clock. The fact that most of my co-workers were not readers made it all somewhat esoteric. To this day, I still heighten and downplay minute words and phrases just to see how close the readers are paying attention. Indeed, the scary verities elucidate remarkable yammering from unexpected nomina.

As to whether I have a Twitter feed, and whether I confess anything there, well, the Internet’s a grand adventure, isn’t it? To me, Twitter seems to be blogging’s answer to the David Markson novel. But now that every word we type is fair game for speculation, a whole grand cabinet of fun has been presented to me.