tweets – {Micah's (Digital)} Portfolio

More Twitter Literature (Twitterature! Can I get a patent on that?) coming your way.

Ah, bad news folks. I looked it up, and apparently “Twitterature” is already a thing. #borninthewrongera

Anyway, so, this week I made a Twitter bot (that’s not illegal right?)! Here is the link to the bot’s account if you’re interested. It was actually pretty fun! Essentially, you create word banks full of words or phrases, and then give the bot options (called ‘origins’) on how to organize those words and phrases. It is written in JSON code, here is a copy of the code I used (it’s a bit long, you definitely don’t have to read the whole thing, but this will give you an idea of how the Twitter bot works).

{
“origin”: [
“#pronoun# #verb# #reason#, and #then# #outcome#”,
“#action# in #place# #seems# #adjective#”
],
“pronoun”: [
“I”,
“My dogs”,
“The voices in my head”,
“My parents”,
“The father, the son, and the holy ghost”
],
“verb”: [
“died because of”,
“found”,
“took all the drugs and thought they were”,
“fervently worship”
],
“reason”: [
“John Cena”,
“penguins”,
“a clock”,
“the internet”,
“the browser ‘firefox'”,
“pizza”
],
“then”: [
“that’s why”,
“then I discovered”,
“now I feel like”
],
“outcome”: [
“I can’t be sincere.”,
“I was asleep.”,
“I was late for work.”,
“the world is going to end.”,
“depression is a thing.”
],
“action”: [
“Crying”,
“Taking Xanax”,
“Filming an X-rated movie”,
“Making out”,
“Ordering pizza”,
“Being stoned”,
“Eating alone”,
“Dying”
],
“place”: [
“the White House”,
“public”,
“space”,
“a factory that processes peanuts”,
“a bar”,
“7-11”,
“my kitchen”,
“my cubicle”
],
“seems”: [
“seems”,
“sounds”,
“is”,
“was”,
“might be”
],
“adjective”: [
“fun.”,
“impossible.”,
“a little sad.”,
“actually kind of enlightening.”,
“addicting.”,
“arousing.”
]
}

Using this code, I set the tweets to post randomly every half hour so I could get some examples, such as:

In writing the codes for my Twitter bot, I chose sentence structures that were common in Mira Gonzalez and Tao Lin’s Selected Tweets (which we have been studying). For example, “[pronoun] [did something], and [that’s why something else].” seemed to be a frequent structure. As well as “[doing something] in [a place] [was/is] [adjective].” So, my two origins were based on these structures.

Examples of each structure. The bot randomly chooses from each of the origins (structures).

I also used words and phrases to fill my word banks that were frequent in Gonzalez and Lin’s tweets. I chose to do this because the nature of the two poets tweets are very random, and have ridiculous premises. Obviously, people tweet things like that though, so a bot that spouts out similar tweets wouldn’t be absolutely ridiculous (well, I suppose that’s debatable).

In doing this project, I wasn’t necessarily trying to create a bot that would create literary valuable tweets, but I was trying to create one that was more relatable than your average bot. Also, I aimed to create tweets that played off of the random nature of a twitter bot. I think I succeeded in this goal, most of the tweets made sense, and could have been posted by a real person. Also, I think they were some pretty entertaining tweets!

Comparing this form of literature with the previous twitter literature I created, I would definitely say that creating a “twitter story” is more literary valuable. Creating a Twitter story gives you so much more freedom and variables you can play with. Using a twitter bot, you would not really be able to create a coherent story across multiple tweets, because it is just so random. You could definitely use a Twitter bot to create multiple short stories in singular tweets. The more words you have in your word banks, the more stories it would create, but each story would be limited to a separate tweet. So, I believe that you can definitely create more valuable literature on Twitter without a bot.

That being said, I do not think that bots take away the humanity of writing tweets. You are still required to write all the code, phrases, word banks, and structures yourself. There is still quite a bit of creativeness and detail that has to go into creating the code for these bots. It is certainly a form of literature, although it has more limitations than “traditional” literature. I would also argue that this form of literature doesn’t “mass produce” content, At least, not any more than content is already mass produced on Twitter.

Creating a twitter bot was a very interesting experience, and I think it would be a lot of fun to keep expanding on my structures and word banks. Although, before I do that, I would really like to create some more twitter stories! I think there are so many fun options, using multiple accounts, and/or retweets, and/or other aspects that twitter can offer.

Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed!

Ah, Twitter. The ultimate collection of hysterical celebrities, illiterate masses, and random clutter posts that have no apparent meaning or value. Of course, Twitter does have contributions to offer to the world; quick news flashes, a good platform for bouncing ideas off of like minded people, and some would even say a good source of memes.

However, most people, from what I have observed, do not expect anything of specific literary value to come from Twitter. This isn’t necessarily surprising, I mean, each tweet can only be 280 characters long. However, some people, like Tao Lin, believe that tweets have an inherent literary nature.

Selected Tweets; a faux leather, embossed novel filled with tweets from these two poets.

Tao Lin and Mira Gonzalez picked some of their tweets to publish in physical book form. But they didn’t stop there, they decided the cover should be faux leather, and that it should be silver and gold embossed. This book is very entertaining, but the important part is that it raises the question of the literary potential of Twitter. Despite Twitter’s limitations and quirks, can I also create something of literary value? I attempted to and, if I do say so myself, I believe I succeeded.

@ME after I finished my Twitter story. Except #noskimmilk

So, the point of this post is to talk about my story. You can read it on Twitter here. Or here. Or click here if you want. All the links lead to the same place. I just really think you should read it.

There were a couple options for writing my Twitter story, either writing one story that took place over multiple tweets, or writing multiple short stories that each had their own tweet. I chose to write a story that took place over multiple tweets, and then add another twist on top of that. I realized that if I wanted to make my story coherent, I would have to post each tweet backwards, so that when you are scrolling from the top down, it reads like a normal story. Then, I thought, “What if I wrote my story so that it could be read either way the user scrolled?” So, I attempted to write a story that was broken up into little segments, and could be read forwards and backwards.

Personally, I think my attempt was successful! I really like this piece of literature because I have never written, or seen, a story that can be read backwards and forwards (I wouldn’t be surprised if one already exists, but I haven’t read any). Interestingly enough, the restrictions and specifications of the Twitter platform, in my opinion, enhanced my story. Each tweet has its own separate box, so I didn’t have to worry about my readers accidentally combining portions of the story in their head, or skipping over parts while scrolling back up. The scrolling aspect of Twitter also helps my story, because scrolling back up the posts in a profile is much easier than flipping through a book backwards. I also appreciated the fact that each section of the story had to be 280 characters or less, it created a fun challenge for me!

If one were to accept the “Twitter story” as a genre, I believe that this genre does have literary value. Because of the unique platform Twitter has, it opens up new veins for creative aspects in stories, as you can see through my story. There are so many more options to be explored through this medium with writing stories. Using retweets and comments and such, you could essentially create a living dialogue in your story, for example. There are so many possibilities! I think the Twitter story is also valuable because people are spending increasing portions of their days on social media. In order for authors to continue spreading their works and ideas, they can post stories, or teasers to their stories, on twitter to try and reach a large audience. There is definitely a large market on Twitter, and it would be foolish to not take advantage of that.

I hope you enjoyed my story, and this blog post! Thank you for reading!

Tag: tweets

Digital Lab Assignment #7: Twitter Bots ~OR~ Are Xanax and Pizza Relatable?

Digital Lab Assignment #6: Twitter Stories! ~OR~ I’ve Read it Both Ways