Chaos Program

I ran across an interesting internet hoax yesterday. Apparently, a number of people believed the announcement that Twitter was going to start offering special accounts – for a fee – that would allow both more than the usual 140 character limit on posts and would, apparently, randomly force people to follow these special pay accounts. (For the record, no, I’m not one of the people who fell for it. Really. You believe me don’t you?). See Twitterville Falls For Premium Accounts Hoax for more information.

Poor Twitter. People are making fun of their business model just because they don’t have one!

Let’s just take it as stipulated that Twitter is cool. That’s one of the reasons it gets targeted for silly jokes like that. If you don’t even know what Twitter is, you’re not cool. Sorry. That’s life. Look at The Infection Meme and Twitter to broaden your education. More importantly, it sometimes has value, though not always where you think. And I don’t just mean this: Ohio Cops Use Twitter to Talk to Residents.

One feature of Twitter (apparently not entirely planned by the creators) is the ability to tag posts for subject matter and search on those tags, so that you see what the whole world is saying about a subject, not just the people you personally follow. During the final episode of Battlestar Galactica I posted several items with the tag #BSG, to show that I was talking about BSG. See how it works?

There are services out there that allow you to leverage these tags. One such service, WeFollow, lets people register their user names in conjunction with up to 3 tags and then when other people search WeFollow for those tags, they will see posts from the users who associated themselves with the tags (Maybe it makes more sense if you just go look at the WeFollow website.).

I’m undecided about registering with WeFollow myself. The biggest reason is that it requires you to validate your membership on Twitter by allowing WeFollow “to access and update your data on Twitter” (That’s from the authorization page. Emphasis theirs), and I’m not sure I want to do that. Funny. I let applications access my profile on Facebook frequently – but ask for the same thing in a different context and it seems ominous. Paranoid much?

See WeFollow Twitter directory: Kevin Rose’s latest for more about WeFollow.

Anyway, having found that mildly amusing, I tried something I thought would be more interesting. I searched  Twitter for the tag #haiku. Twitter is well suited for haiku because of the 140 character limit on posts. More accurately, the 140 character limit makes Twitter better suited for haiku than for sonnets, or almost any other kind of poetry (though one of these days I’m planning on doing a series of tweets modeled after the old Burma Shave stuff. This Social Web / Is kind of fun / but I’m bored with Tweet Spam / You’re following is done. Twitter Shave.”)

The search brought up a lot of haiku. I won’t reproduce any of them here. If you’re interested, try it by clicking http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23haiku

For full disclosure, sometimes I post things that will come up in that search. It seems to me that the ephemeral nature of 140 character posts streaming by is well suited to the moment-of-surprise aspect of haiku. Either that, or I have too short an attention span for anything else. My blog posts certainly seem to wander, don’t they?

Or maybe not. After reading several hundred Twitter haiku I learned two things:

1. There are some amazingly good poets putting stuff on Twitter.
2. But the overwhelming majority of them are TERRIBLE.

It was  a surprise to see the high proportion of Twitter haiku that concerned fecal matter (not usually as politely described as that). I’m pretty sure this is not what the great Japanese masters of old intended when they invented the form. That “moment of surprise” was not intended for shock, disgust and even sadness at the empty heads of so many people. Well done haiku can be truly beautiful. It can evoke profound thoughts (not that I know much about those) and make you feel a wide range of emotions.

I’m particularly fond of a modern variant of haiku, scifaiku, which is (basically) haiku with a science fiction (or other genre) twist (see Scifaiku.com for more on this fascinating art form). I’ve written and even published some of it. Scifaiku (and the wider range of science fiction poetry) is some of the most creative work you’ll ever see. I would even be willing to go out on a limb and say that poetry should have more creativity and less excrement.

I subscribed to an RSS feed of Twitter haiku but if the feces-to-poetry ratio doesn’t improve I probably won’t keep it. But it was an interesting experiment.

Tags: haiku, hoax, poetry, scifaiku, twitter

This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2009 at 9:53 am and is filed under literature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.