Kafka would have had a Twitter feed

Kottke writes in defence of Twitter and quotes Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG:

Kafka would have had a Twitter feed! And so would have Hemingway, and so would have Virgil, and so would have Sappho. It’s a tool for writing. Heraclitus would have had a f***ing Twitter feed.

Tee-hee.
Since I am finding my job particularly fascinating at the moment, I am using Twitter as an online diary of my work activities.  Meanwhile, my relentless, commentless blogging about Internet Philosophy was vindicated yesterday, when I was able to instantly call up several links for the gentleman running Livefiction.co.uk (which has obvious similarities to what we did with Sweet Fanny Adams).  For anyone who is not famous, and doesn’t have the time to make themselves famous (or infamous) online, I think blogging-as-scrapbook is probably the easiest way to justify an online presence.
This is all old ground of course.  And Orwell would have had a blog.

6 Replies to “Kafka would have had a Twitter feed”

  1. Just as a follow up to the livefiction.co.uk reference there is a book I was reommended and have been dipping into called Hamlet on the Holodeck by Janet Murray. It covers a brief history of story telling within media and looks at the way the internet offers new ways of designing, telling and interacting with narratives. It seems to have an air of declaring a profound paradigm shift which may overlook, I belive, the dangers of promoting the benefits of one narrative genre so exultantly over all others. However it does provide some very intersting thoughts on how we occupy different subject positions and what sort of discourse is used when representing life in virtual worlds such as second life (which could relate to how films also present this multiplicy of identity in different ways as you mentioned in relation to cyber-realism…?)

  2. Here is a little quote from a chapter on her website that might help to give what I mentioned a bit of substance: ‘if we want to see beyond the current horizon of scrapbook multimedia, it is important first to identify the essential properties of digital environments, that is, the qualities comparable to the variability of the lens, the movability of the camera, and the editability of film, that will determine the distinctive power and form of a mature electronic narrative art.’

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