Recent Institute visitor Teju Cole discusses the limits and possibilities of Twitter as a literary form in the "6th floor blog" of the New York Times:
"When the merits of Twitter are debated, one sentiment invariably is at the top of the con column: 140 characters are seldom enough to express the full weight of an idea. Or at least an idea that’s worth expressing."
"People have found ways around this: conjoined tweets, live-tweeting, etc. … The novelist Teju Cole expanded on this theme on Wednesday, when he posted an entire short story via tweet. Yes, that has been done before. But Cole’s project was different, because the individual tweets were posted not by him, but by his followers, and then @TejuCole retweeted them in chronological order to form a sort of quilted story."
More in the New York Times: http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/09/teju-cole-puts-story-telling-to-the-twitter-test/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0
More about Teju Cole's visit in February 2012: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/cole_teju12.html
