Thursday night’s abhorrent online vigilantism — in which Reddit and Twitter users seized upon police radio chatter to accuse a missing (and completely innocent) Brown University student of bombing the Boston Marathon — reminded us of one of the most under-acknowledged facts of the internet: that beyond the sleek, profitable edifices of Web 2.0 there remains the humming, virtual presence of an online crowd that is restive, unpredictable, and hungry for a cause.
Will Glovinsky, “The Wisdom of Crowds: Reddit, Twitter, and the Hunt for the Wrong Man.”
A Touch of Worldliness
To celebrate National Poetry Month, The Atlantic’s Twitter book club is reading (and discussing) The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry. Follow along on Twitter @1book140.
What participation in social media comes down to, I think, is that either you have an instinct for broadcasting your life, or you don’t. Mary MacLane would have been a natural.
Emily St. John Mandel, ”I Await the Devil’s Friend Request: On Social Media and Mary MacLane”
“Total student. Bacon ninja. Prone to fits of apathy.” A selection of spambot bios.
I want to conduct an experiment.
We often think of written fiction as timeless, crafted for history. I want to write extremely timely fiction, nearly ephemeral. I want to write a story not just set in the present, but set in this very week. Almost real-time. A serialized narrative that keeps up with the events of our world and weaves them into its tale as it goes.
But also, I want to conduct an experiment with you.
“A March Story,” by Andrew Fitzgerald (and you!)
Finnegans Wake-ify your Twitter timeline, why don’t you?
You can all quit Twitter now. Pentametron 2013 is the only account that matters.
In a surprising twist of fate, the author of a Philip Roth Twitter account is not actually Roth himself.
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