Twitter

I started a Twitter account in the spring of 2010, to follow Cassandra Wilson (thank you @reallycassandra)—but it was December before I tweeted anything myself  >>> 

My first tweet

>>> & it was the day after Christmas 2010 at the kitchen table when I saw the news from @Souihli in Tunis about a young man born five Marches before my son >>> 

>>> & saw this: 

Eventually I figured out that Twitter included celebrities & people tweeting to their friends, but I came to it a different way: 

>>> & I started to spend time in Birdland every day, as the drama of the uprising in Tunisia & then in Egypt was unfolding. The first person ever to answer me on Twitter was @Souihli, from Tunis, after I retweeted & translated something from French—@Souihli explained that more people would get the message if I knew what a hashtag was.  (Shukran.)

I still have no idea what @Souihli looks like, to which gender(s) @Souihli might belong, or what @Souihli's other names might be. The basis of our connection was our excitement over yet another unlikely outbreak of human freedom, & this technology let us share this. I've never had a Facebook account, which always seemed to me from a distance a little like treating friends like strangers—I loved discovering Twitter because it seemed to be treating strangers like friends.

One of these strangers/friends was/is the amazing Dima Khatib, then Al Jazeera bureau chief for Latin America, based in Caracas, who sent messages in eight languages about revolution & about the moon: 

It was a great gift when part of the spirit that swept through Tunisia & Egypt touched my Manhattan in the fall of 2011, & Dima could hashtag #ows back to me >>>

Dima was not a 'nobody' as per this tweet, <<< but she was part of a network that fascinated me, of citizens, "giving information to the ppl"—a group I inadvertently & proudly became part of, mainly by listening & spreading around, via retweets & translations, what other people said: 

In three years, Twitter has changed the way I find news:  ending my decades-long affair with the New York Times, & my few years of reading half a dozen newspapers in three languages on line, luring me most days into the living stream of a timeline, with its details & jokes & immediacies & quarrels & inaccuracies & exhortations & thousands of possibilities for learning more in other directions. Twitter has made that other kind of news seem a little like eating food someone else has already chewed.

I've learned that I'm not a very good reporter; I like to go home & think, I get too excited, torn between participating & observing, my hands shake. (But where would this world be without the videos of citizens whose hands shake?) But Twitter has changed how I experience street demonstrations—because now, more often than not, I'm telling someone:  not a someone related to me by any conventional measure, but a someone who's no one, maybe who's everyone:  maybe Margaret Walker's 'a world that will hold all the people,' which might look something like this :

(When I was a kid in Scituate I was jealous when I read that Virginia Woolf got her mail delivered twice a day...) 

(I still wish Twitter would say Reader instead of Follower) (I read you but I don't necessarily follow you, & I want that in return)