Is Twitter what Rayuela tried to be?
Two brief exchanges over the course of the past week have left me with the question above.
@litherland [15 Jan 2012]:
I’m fascinated by the idea of a “book” not as a discrete object but as motley events dispersed across time and space.
@rogre [15 Jan 2012]
@litherland Sounds a lot like @somebadideas on “life today” (due to social media): twitter.com/rogre/status/1… Is Twitter the “book” you describe?
@somebadideas [10 Jan 2012]
Fumbling this thought: the novel is supposedly dying, but life today feels like a radically experimental novel more than all other mediums.
@rogre [10 Jan 2012]
@somebadideas You might say that life today is Rayuela (Hopscotch) by Julio Cortázar made immersive, brought alive. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopscotch…
Imagine a book comprised of pages in pairs. The left page of each pair has short biographies for a cast of characters. The right page of each pair of pages consist of brief lines of observations, descriptions, thoughts, etc. coming from that cast. Some of these snippets refer to each other, other snippets stand in isolation. Occasionally they refer to cast members listed elsewhere in the book. Each time you open the book, the bios and the snippets have been updated to reflect the moment.
In essence, I already have this book. Each cast is a sub-set (sometimes contained in a list) of the many people that I follow on Twitter. Occasionally something bridges those sub-sets. I can never read the whole book, but I always come back, engaged by the process of piecing together the many, interwoven stories.
Update: Forgot to mention the multimedia aspect and interactivity of Twitter, hopefully implied. Embedded images, sound, and video abound. You can talk to the characters, and they can talk back. You can change the cast. You can CYOA.
