Eng. 335-01 Response #8
The use of twitter as a platform for electronic literature, as seen in “Black Box” is an interesting one. It certainly fits within the scope of electronic literature, in the sense that this form of literature is next to impossible to re-create in a paper medium (short of crowd sourcing and individually publishing snippets of the story one at a time and making them available to participants in the same fashion as twitter posts), making it a uniquely electronic form of literature. However, where things become muddled and potentially fragmented has to do with the intrinsic problems of the format itself; timing can become fragmented and incoherent due to the regularity that people interact with twitter. I am by no means an expert in social media, and certainly not an authority on twitter, but I cannot help but feel that people would not check their twitter feeds with the same level of regularity that they would another form f social media, like facebook or instagram. While this may be intended as a commentary on the disconnect between social media and real life, it also comes across as fragmentary and difficult to follow. It feels as though, in order to follow the posts as they were happening in real time when this project was live, must have taken a fair amount of time and effort. This is by no means a criticism of the project, but more so a reflection on potentially shifting the platform for this style of piece for future iterations.