Changing the World, One Tweet at a Time

While Twitter is quickly rising in the ranks of popular social networking sites, it’s also igniting some cultural trends and transformations among the literary set. This week we learned that teens don’t Tweet, thanks to a slightly skewed Morgan Stanley Report with a sample size of one 15-year old boy followed up by a generous Nielsen Report measuring the size of the Twitter footprint among age groups. According to the report, the Twitter trend ranks low among tweens and teens but hits hard among adults ages twenty-five to fifty-four.
For evidence of the power of the Tweeting trend and how it just might infiltrate the younger generation, just look to the newly signed authors, Alexander Aicman and Emmett Rensin, two University of Chicago students who have written “Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less”. The book is emblematic of our contemporary world, where easily digestible bits of knowledge are the daily bread of fast-paced lifestyles and the hipster- aesthetic is easily condensed to coffee table cool. In an author’s note the two nineteen year olds question the social attention span asking, “After all, as great as the classics are, who has time to read those big, long books anymore?”

The book is due at the end of the year on the Penguin imprint.