Über-Twitter

Admittedly, as my ex-colleague, N. M. (not his real name) has pointed out, twitter can be used for far more than merely following celebrities from their bathrooms to their cars to their studio. Or wherever. In contrast to these trivial twitters, N. M. can create surprisingly erudite virtual groups which revel in their ability to express recursive witticisms or other philoso-mathematical comments, or reduce the essence of their ideas to 140 characters—which is already more than I can do with this essay only 1/3rd complete.

Of course, Mankind has always reveled in its ability to excel in limited forms:
Haiku and Sonnet are but two examples. Shakespeare excelled in the latter, for instance. But surely, he would have been severely limited had he not been able to write his magnificent plays, from Hamlet to Lear, from Richard III to Midsummer Night’s Dream, and so on. And we would have been robbed needlessly of these.

Similarly, Goethe excelled in lyric poems, but would have been stymied had he been forced to limit Faust to Twitter-length.

I shudder to think of what would have happened to Mankind’s greatest heritages: Odyssey and Iliad, not to mention Mahabharata. Entire nations gained their identities for thousands of years from these epic poems. Please note the word “epic”.

In music too, lovely melodies were written in about twitter length, but where would Beethoven’s mighty symphonies have been had they been compressed to twitter? Not mention Bach’s St. Mathew’s Passion (which, of course, I have just mentioned).

Twitter is neat, twitter is witty, twitter apparently can create kindred groups. But could these groups not be created otherwise? I challenge a twitter group to respond to this essay twitterwise. But even if they could, they should also explain why.

Of course, people climb Mt. Everest “because it’s there”.

Why ever(est) not?