Media Twitter and the Cult of Personality

A collection of very important thoughts, no doubt benefitting the writing community immensely.

Each morning I wake up and think about deleting my Twitter account.

Then I roll over, reach for my phone, and scroll through a stream of my fellow writers sharing what fresh hell the new day hath wrought in 140 character snippets.

Many consider a flourishing Twitter presence to be a hallmark of a modern writer, particularly if one is young and climbing the ranks of the digital media universe. Zadie Smith has repeatedly proclaimed social media would “threaten” her writing, but not all of us can live in the quiet mystery of our West Village brownstones, updating the world to our thoughts on current cultural and political affairs with an infrequent Harper’s essay.

No, for the rest of us, Twitter is a water cooler of the writing world. Most of us spend our days in the corner of a Starbucks, probably a little too close to the bathroom for comfort, huddled over our laptops and attempting to pour out our souls through our fingers. Twitter is that cool, blue balm that offers us camaraderie after a day (or, more accurately, 78 times throughout that day) of isolation.

In many ways, I am not sure what I would do without Twitter. I certainly have no great following, and most of my posts are incoherent exclamations related to bread interspersed with promotions of my own work. But simply existing somewhere…