I love Twitter. As with most things technological, I’m a relatively late adopter, and I don’t tweet much as I don’t have much worth saying.
But I enjoy being part of the Twitter community, which seems to me on the whole rather more good-natured than Facebook, the bullyboy of social media. Bullying happens on Twitter, of course – we saw some appalling examples during last summer’s Olympics – but it seems to be less common.
I suspect that’s because Twitter is that bit more public – it’s very easy to check up on what someone’s saying without actually following them; and because that challenging 140-character limit means you’re quite likely, mid-expletive, to be told you’re on -3 characters.
When I do tweet, I enjoy trying to get my message across in just 140 characters, without resorting to hideous text-speak: the day I say ‘U’ instead of ‘you’ is the day hell freezes over. And it seems writers of fiction like the same challenge – there are Twitter fiction competitions and festivals springing up all over the place, and The Guardian recently ran a series of short stories by well-known writers using the 140-character limit.
They’d have to go a long way to match Ernest Hemingway, who was once challenged to write a short story using just six words. He came up with a tale using less than twenty-five per cent of the characters available to Twitter users, and of such elegant economy and poignancy that when I recently told it to a friend, her eyes instantly filled with tears. Can anyone beat it? Here it is:
“For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.”