{"id":17,"date":"2015-02-16T15:35:11","date_gmt":"2015-02-16T22:35:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/libr559mfh\/?p=17"},"modified":"2015-02-16T17:07:37","modified_gmt":"2015-02-17T00:07:37","slug":"bending-the-medium-to-his-purposes-jeet-heer-and-the-twitter-essay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/libr559mfh\/2015\/02\/16\/bending-the-medium-to-his-purposes-jeet-heer-and-the-twitter-essay\/","title":{"rendered":"“Bending the Medium to His Purposes”:\u00a0 Jeet Heer and the Twitter Essay"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"jeet2\"<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. I became interested in the \u201cTwitter essay\u201d as a genre during the Jian Ghomeshi scandal. #ghomeshi #surewastrendingforawhilethere #schadenfreude<\/li>\n
  2. During that time, Oct and Nov 2014, \u00a0Canadian journalist Jeet Heer @HeerJeet sent out a series of\u00a0numbered tweets on the subject. #twitteressay #whoisthisguy<\/li>\n
  3. They were captivating; some now collected on Storify<\/a>.<\/li>\n
  4. Turns out Heer has been numbering his Tweets long before Ghomeshi. #robford #aoscott #adulthood #plagarism<\/li>\n
  5. Heer claims <\/a>not to have invented\u00a0the form, although he is credited with popularizing it.<\/li>\n
  6. He says<\/a>, \u201cA Twitter essay isn\u2019t really an argument; it\u2019s the skeleton of an argument.\u201d<\/li>\n
  7. The essay is different\u00a0from a Twitter storm (colourful example here<\/a>) — which is merely a collection of tweets on the same subject. The essay has more form than this.<\/li>\n
  8. The Twitter essay has strength!<\/li>\n
  9. Followers can respond after the very first tweet, allowing the author to adjust direction and focus.<\/li>\n
  10. Followers can retweet, generating interest and increasing the audience in real\u00a0time.\"twitter<\/li>\n
  11. Immediate\u00a0conversations and collaboration on Twitter affords what Heer calls <\/a>\u201cdigital intimacy\u201d not seen in other media.<\/li>\n
  12. Unlike other forms of (solitary) writing, Twitter essays are performances.<\/li>\n
  13. Author can directly address individuals in tweets, engaging their attention for dialog or response (@HeerJeet).<\/li>\n
  14. When the tweets in an essay are numbered, you can tell when a single one is plucked from its context. #contextmatters #staytuned #moreonthis<\/li>\n
  15. Heer announces the end of a series so followers aren\u2019t kept on edges of seats. #theend<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    In using Twitter in this way, Heer has managed to subvert the expectation that a tweet must stand alone. When we get\u00a0advice to\u00a0\u201cmake it tweetable,\u201d \u00a0we are being asked to come up with an idea that can be communicated and understood by the intended audience in a 140 characters without any explanation or context. But Heer is, in the words of his colleague Michael Hingston, \u201cbending the medium to his purposes<\/a>,\u201d and in so doing is arguably becoming one of Canada\u2019s most interesting public intellectuals.\u00a0Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic Monthly<\/em>\u00a0demanded\u00a0\u201cWHO ARE YOU????!!???<\/a>\u201d on first encountering Heer’s\u00a0novel\u00a0redefinition\u00a0of the Twitter form, but there are now plenty of examples of others structuring their thoughts in this way.<\/p>\n

    There is more to say about Twitter and context. I\u00a0explore this further in my next post<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    For more on Jeet Heer, check out his (rather low-tech) website<\/a>.\"jeet<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I became interested in the \u201cTwitter essay\u201d as a genre during the Jian Ghomeshi scandal. #ghomeshi #surewastrendingforawhilethere #schadenfreude During that time, Oct and Nov 2014, \u00a0Canadian journalist Jeet Heer @HeerJeet sent out a series of\u00a0numbered tweets on the subject. #twitteressay #whoisthisguy They were captivating; some now collected on Storify. Turns out Heer has been numbering […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18460,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57784],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-twitter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/libr559mfh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/libr559mfh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/libr559mfh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/libr559mfh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18460"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/libr559mfh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/libr559mfh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/libr559mfh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions\/41"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/libr559mfh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/libr559mfh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/libr559mfh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}