Twitter

On Quitting Social Media: A Poem

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In lieu of my usual Secret Library column this Friday, an announcement – not a particularly momentous one – and a poem. Yesterday, I made the decision to leave Twitter for good. This is nothing to do with my experience of running the @InterestingLit account (which has, 99.9% of the time, been nothing but positive, and has led to some thoughtful and illuminating comments from like-minded followers), but with the general air of toxicity pervading the site. When I joined in 2009, it was a community of bright-eyed people who wanted to indulge in their nerdy interests and who seemed, universally, to be full of enthusiasm for this new social network which enabled you to spend some time connecting with people you wouldn’t usually meet in ‘real life’.

Sadly, those halcyon days are no more.

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Ten ‘Modern’ Words with Older Literary Connections

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If you think ‘totes’, ‘fangirl’, and ‘trick out’ are recent idioms, then we’re here to surprise you. In a previous post on Twitter terms and literature we uncovered some of the ancient literary origins of words more commonly associated these days with the world of social networking.

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The Best Literary Facts from the Twitterverse

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Last Wednesday, we issued our 50,000 followers on Twitter with a challenge: to tweet us with the best literary fact they know. The reason for this was simple: since last December, the modestly sized research team here at Interesting Literature has been tweeting (as @InterestingLit) little facts, quotations, and links based on all aspects of literature, … Read more

Twitter Terms and Literature

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The word ‘tweet’ – meaning to post a message or item of information on Twitter – has this month (June 2013) been added to the Oxford English Dictionary or OED. In honour of this occasion, we thought we’d offer some interesting facts about terms associated with Twitter, and the stories surrounding their earlier uses. Many of them have … Read more