I like the shared conversation aspect of Twitter. Last December I attended a
national conference on literature and language. One of the presenters
discussed using Twitter to make communal art. In one instance, a group of
slammers, rapper-like poets who tend to improvise, asked audience members to
tweet words, lines, and ideas; the tweets were then projected on screens for
the performers to riff from. In another instance, an artist was able to
project an image onto a building wall; the image had spaces for text, and
passersby could tweet improvised lines of poetry into the image. This, by no
means, cancels out the sensability and craft of an individual artist, but it
may possibly yield a more honest product. Think of all the awful books that
have been written about blind people, who generally come off as pathetic in
some way. If the sighted writer of the next such book were to elicit tweets
from a bunch of blind people, s/he may develop a mor balanced character.

On a more practical plane, I'm actually thinking about updating my cellphone
to one that supports a screen reader for a couple of reasons. First, I find
that I'm starting to need to use text messaging for work. Second, as a
freelancer, I can imagine using Twitter to let my regulars know whether I'm
free and available or not. Most of the people I know who use Twitter do it
for practical reasons, to remind each other that they need to stop by the
grocery store on the way home, to contact coworkers about a job related
issue, to communicate about an upcoming event.


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