Twitterature

It was only a matter of time before internet users used their “collective energy” to make a collaborative work of literature, writes The Independent. “The World According to Twitter: Crowd-sourced Wit and Wisdom from David Pogue (and His 350,000 Followers) is the work of The New York Times technology writer Pogue, who asked his Twitter followers questions ranging from ‘What’s your greatest regret?’ to ‘What’s the best bumper sticker you’ve seen lately?’, then collected the best of their responses and published 2,524 of them in book form. ‘Compose the subject line of an email message you really, really don’t want to read,’ goes the first request. The responses include ‘To my former sexual partners, as required by law’ and ‘Your Dad is now following you on Twitter’. To the prompt ‘Add 1 letter to a famous person’s name; explain’, witty users replied with ‘Malcolm XY: Civil rights activist, definitively male’, and ‘Sean Penne: Starchy, overcooked actor/activist’. Since the book went to press, Pogue’s follower count has leapt to more than 1.2 million, making its subtitle slightly less accurate than Wikipedia.”