The concept of Twitter fiction is interesting to me because there are no real guidelines for what to do or how to do it, but we can still make a value judgment of good or bad use of the medium. Based on Ruth Page’s “Celebrity Practice” chapter, I think there are two distinct avenues authors can take, which is where we can split Cole and Egan. In her analysis, Page describes three different styles of tweets: the addressed message, the retweet, and the update. While the addressed message is “a public tweet that begins with an @username address” and retweets are “tweets that have been forwarded without amendment,” updates are, according to Page, “all other publicly available tweets that appear in a tweeter’s timeline” (93-4). Basically, the update is your average, everyday tweet.
Egan’s “Black Box” operates using the update style of tweet so well that, for the most part, you wouldn’t necessarily know that you are reading a segment of a complete short story unless you knew that you were reading a part of a short story. Most of the tweets that create “Black Box” are quips, observations, adages, and aphorisms that actually sound like tweets you could read if you were to look at your average Twitter feed. For example, “The first thirty seconds in a person’s presence are the most important” (1), “Never look for hidden cameras: the fact that you’re looking will give you away” (12), and “Knowing your latitude and longitude is not the same as knowing where you are” (22) all make complete sense when isolated and removed from the story. And, I can almost guarantee that similar tweets have been composed by “average” Twitter users outside of any storytelling context because they all have the observational quality present in many tweets, Facebook status updates, or Instagram captions—what Page refers to as “tellability” (104).
While reading “Black Box,” I went through the painstaking process of marking tweets that can function independently of the story and still make sense as well as the tweets that only work if you read the larger story. The former category outnumbers the latter. I think this is part of what makes Egan’s story a “successful” piece of Twitter fiction; “Black Box” is able to capture the essence of the social media site and re-channel it into a means for telling a story.
When it comes to looking at individual tweets, Egan’s choice of diction—beauty, Designated Mate, Hotspot, etc.—allows tweets that would normally make sense solely in the storytelling context to function as independent updates as well. Chapter 12 has a solid example of this in the tweet “The concerns of your Designated Mate are your concerns.” I think the most interesting part about this aspect of the text is the duality it creates. In the context of the story, this tweet means one thing—chiefly that the citizen agent must surrender herself so completely to the mission at hand that she must become one with this violent and dangerous man—and it means another thing entirely if taken out of the story context and looked at on an individual basis. In this later case it seems much more heartwarming and loving because “Designated Mate” does not carry an inherent dangerous and violent quality; it only gains those implications from the story.
When Egan uses linked tweets (tweets that cannot be fully understood independently and require knowledge of previous tweets to make sense) she often marks them with repetition, specifically demonstrating their connectedness, such as the repetition of “You will be tempted” in chapter 7 or “Only then” in chapter 9. The significance of these linked tweets, especially those marked with repetition, is that we are given another layer of understanding. On the macro level, we have an entire story unit. On the most micro level, we have individual tweets that are meaningful on their own. By linking certain tweets, there is also a middle ground where several consecutive tweets can be taken out of the larger story as a grouped unit and make sense that way. Therefore, “Black Box” offers several different levels of storytelling depending on how you orient yourself as the reader.
For my money (or lack thereof), I think Egan uses Twitter as a storytelling medium more effectively than Cole. Cole clearly does not use the update style of tweet for his storytelling. Instead, he plays with Twitter’s sense of community and interaction in “Hafiz” and “A Piece of the Wall.” While we do not necessarily need to frame these different approaches as a “who did it better?” throwdown, I do think there is something we can talk about when it comes to making effective use of Twitter as a storytelling medium that actually does something for the text rather than simply being a different way to deliver it.
