{"id":486003,"date":"2010-03-29T16:08:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-29T20:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nybooks.com\/post\/482335188"},"modified":"2010-03-29T16:08:00","modified_gmt":"2010-03-29T20:08:00","slug":"atwood-in-the-twittersphere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/486003","title":{"rendered":"Atwood in the Twittersphere"},"content":{"rendered":"

Margaret Atwood<\/h4>\n
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Margaret Atwood, tweeting aboard the Queen Mary 2, August 2009<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

A long time ago\u2014less than a year ago in fact, but time goes all stretchy in the Twittersphere, just as it does in those folksongs in which the hero spends a night with the Queen of Faerie and then returns to find that a hundred years have passed and all his friends are dead\u2026. Where was I?<\/p>\n

Oh yes. A long time ago, back in June of 2009, when we were planning the launch of The Year of the Flood<\/em> and I was building a Web site for it<\/a>. Why was I doing this building, rather than the publishers? Well, they had their own sites, and I wanted to do some non-publishing things on mine, such as raise awareness of rare-bird vulnerability<\/a> and heighten Virtuous Coffee Consumption (Arabica, shade-grown, doesn\u2019t kill birds) and blog the seven-country dramatic-and-musical book tour we were about to do. Anyway, the publishers were at that time hiding under rocks, as it was still the Great Financial Meltdown, not to mention the Horrid Tsunami of Electronic Book Transmission. \u201cThat sounds wonderful, Margaret,\u201d they said, with the queasy encouragement shown by those on the shore waving goodbye to someone who\u2019s about to shoot Niagara Falls in a barrel.<\/p>\n

Oops! I shouldn\u2019t have said that. Which is typical of \u201csocial media\u201d: you\u2019re always saying things you shouldn\u2019t have said. But it\u2019s like the days of Hammurabi, and those of the patriarch Isaac in the book of Genesis, come to think of it: once decrees and blessings have made it out of the mouth\u2014or, now, in the 21st century, out of the ends of the fingers and past the Send button\u2014you can\u2019t take them back.<\/p>\n

Anyway, there I was, back in 2009, building the site, with the aid of the jolly retainers over at Scott Thornley + Company<\/a>. They were plying me with oatmeal cookies, showing me wonderful pictures, and telling me what to do. \u201cYou have to have a Twitter feed on your Web site,\u201d they said. \u201cA what?\u201d I said, innocent as an egg unboiled. To paraphrase Wordsworth: What should I know of Twitter? I\u2019d barely even heard of it. I thought it was for kiddies.<\/p>\n

But nothing ventured, no brain drained. I plunged in, and set up a Twitter account<\/a>. My first problem was that there were already two Margaret Atwoods on Twitter, one of them with my picture. This grew; I gave commands; then all other Margaret Atwoods stopped together. I like to think they were sent to a nunnery, but in any case they disappeared. The Twitterpolice had got them. I felt a bit guilty.<\/p>\n

I was told I needed \u201cfollowers.\u201d These were people who would sign on to receive my messages, or \u201ctweets,\u201d whatever those might turn out to be. I hummed a few bars from \u201cMockingbird Hill\u201d\u2014Tra-la-la, twittly-deedee<\/em>\u2014and sacrificed some of my hair at the crossroads, invoking Hermes the Communicator. He duly appeared in the form of media guru McLean Greaves<\/a>, who loosed his carrier pigeons to four of his hundreds of Twitterbuddies; and with their aid, I soon had a few thousand people I didn\u2019t know sending me messages like \u201cOMG! Is it really you?\u201d \u201cI love it when old ladies blog,\u201d one early follower remarked.<\/p>\n

One follower led to another, quite literally. The numbers snowballed in an alarming way, as I scrambled to keep up with the growing horde. Soon there were 32,000\u2014no, wait, 33,000\u2014no, 33,500\u2026 And before you could say LMAO (\u201cLaughing My Ass Off,\u201d as one Twitterpal informed me), I was sucked into the Twittersphere like Alice down the rabbit hole. And here I am.<\/p>\n

The Twittersphere is an odd and uncanny place. It\u2019s something like having fairies at the bottom of your garden. How do you know anyone is who he\/she says he is, especially when they put up pictures of themselves that might be their feet, or a cat, or a Mardi Gras mask, or a tin of Spam?<\/p>\n

But despite their sometimes strange appearances, I\u2019m well pleased with my followers\u2014I have a number of techno-geeks and bio-geeks, as well as many book fans. They\u2019re a playful but also a helpful group. If you ask them for advice, it\u2019s immediately forthcoming: thanks to them, I learned how to make a Twitpic<\/a> photo appear as if by magic, and how to shorten a URL using bit.ly<\/a> or tinyurl<\/a>. They\u2019ve sent me many interesting items pertaining to artificially-grown pig flesh, unusual slugs, and the like. (They deduce my interests.) Some of them have appeared at tour events bearing small packages of organic shade-grown fair-trade coffee. I\u2019ve even had a special badge made by a follower, just for me: \u201cThe \u2018call me a visionary, because I do a pretty convincing science dystopia\u2019 badge<\/a>.\u201d It looks like this:<\/p>\n

\n<\/p>\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

They\u2019re sharp: make a typo and they\u2019re on it like a shot, and they tease without mercy. However, if you set them a verbal challenge, a frisson sweeps through them. They did very well with definitions for \u201cdold socks\u201d\u2014one of my typos\u2014and \u201cThnax,\u201d another one. And they really shone when, during the Olympics, I said that \u201cOwn the podium\u201d was too brash to be Canadian, and suggested \u201cA podium might be nice.\u201d Their own variations poured onto a feed tagged #cpodium: \u201cA podium! For me?\u201d \u201cRent the podium, see if we like it.\u201d \u201cMind if I squeeze by you to get onto that podium?\u201d I was so proud of them! It was like having 33,000 precocious grandchildren!<\/p>\n

They raise funds for charity via things like Twestival<\/a>, they solicit donations for catastrophe victims, they send word of upcoming events, they exchange titles of books they like. Once in a while they\u2019re naughty: I did get word of a fellow who\u2019d made a key safe by hollowing out one of my books. (Big yuks from his pals, one of whom ratted him out to me and even sent a pic.) But after I threatened to put the Purple Cross-eyed Zozzle Curse on him, he assured me that no disrespect was intended. (He was forgiven.)<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s it all about, this Twitter? Is it signaling, like telegraphs? Is it Zen poetry? Is it jokes scribbled on the washroom wall? Is it John Hearts Mary carved on a tree? Let\u2019s just say it\u2019s communication, and communication is something human beings like to do.<\/p>\n

How long will I go on doing this? I\u2019m asked. Well, now. I can\u2019t rightly say. How long\u2014in no more than 140 characters\u2014is \u201clong\u201d?<\/p>\n

\n<\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Margaret Atwood Margaret Atwood, tweeting aboard the Queen Mary 2, August 2009 A long time ago\u2014less than a year ago in fact, but time goes all stretchy in the Twittersphere, just as it does in those folksongs in which the hero spends a night with the Queen of Faerie and then returns to find that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4208,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-486003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4208"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=486003"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486003\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=486003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=486003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=486003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}