I recently wrote an article about the Twitter phenomena. I mentioned its use by the lynch mobs. There are weekly examples about its use for such (or the use of the Internet) reasons. But that’s not the only thing it’s used for (the same goes for a pitchfork). I mentioned some good things one can do with their Twitter account. The same goes for the internets at large.

Until recently I thought that for deep insight nothing beat books. All books are on the net, however I’m speaking of the tools that are specific to the internet (blogs, internet comments, twitter and so on). I was certain that these tools of the Internet were mainly a good conduit for interpersonal connections and provided initial fodder for deeper reads (leading to a book, be it nonfiction or fiction). Blogs and articles may have been close to an exception, but they still weren’t as good as a book (and in many ways they mimic those 'paper methods').

And when it came to fiction, or rather, to seeing a narrative unfold, there was little on the net that could beat books. But I believe that I was wrong in this respect.

Take Twitter. I bemoaned (perhaps taking a Franzenian lean) the 140 character format and claimed that it could only ever be a link to better things. This view, however, lacks imagination. I’ve seen people try to tweet stories through a series of tweets, but this doesn’t appear to be the way to best use the medium. Even if one were to manage to cram each tweet with a scene (or leave a cliff hanger, a reason to ’turn the tweet’), it wouldn’t work (that I've seen). What a proper narrative of tweeting needs (either naturally or unnaturally formed) is a series of different people, interacting with each other—much like characters in a play. We see this sometimes, usually when people fight over something (the aforementioned lynch mob is subtype of this). In these fights we see tension, but there is usually an amount of disengagement before it dies out. But there shouldn’t just be spats, but rather full on human dramas going on. And why not? Either actors and actresses can ad lib something, or real people should do it, or one talented person could do it. It could be for discussions; it could be for many things.

What sparked this idea? Mainly it was seeing the recent push by ISIS, and how they were, are, able to gain traction through their myriad of social media accounts. Some include a wikileaks style account, as well as a cats of ISIS (I kid you not) account. The humor in the latter had me thinking of why I hadn’t seen proper interaction with some other jihadis and enemies. Indeed, this needs to be changed otherwise we’ll see the chance for proper narrative drama (or something new?) pass.

To this end, when I hear that Twitter facilitated the Arab Spring in Egyp—from what I’ve heard, though I've never seen the proof. I pray that there will be something like a breakdown of all the Twitter interactions that led to people on the street (I’m sure our benevolent NSA is already studying them for patterns/predictive abilities). Therefore to take full advantage of the medium there would have to be a way to line up replies and retorts from multiple accounts (and not just a list of tweets).

But this isn’t confined to Twitter. Take Internet comments. Indeed, one could say that they end up providing quite the life to any article (for simply the train-wreck of humanity that they tend to be with trolls and counter trolls, and though I may read these comments, this gets old quick). But there are places, like reddit.com, where these comments take humorous tangential turns and end up in cat-gif fights where successive comments try to out-aww each other. Or one comment starts with a line from a movie and several other comments finish the entire scene.

But it seems to me that even this interaction is not taking full advantage of the medium. Again, a whole narrative with the article and the participating comments could unfold either naturally or with actors/actresses or a very skilled man with sock-puppets. Why not? It would add to what everyone has come to read and be entertained. I shall try to either provide an example of these internet narratives, or complete one myself. Ostensibly one could turn out to be as interesting, as deep, and as long as a novel...

(Note, "Franzenian/Franzenesque lean" refers to Franzen and his comments about Twitter... I have nothing against the man or his works)