Tag Archives: Twitter

Witnessing to Social Media Scammers, Good Novels, and the Legal Power of Music

Social media is something of a minefield. It’s easily misused, partly because it’s easy for people to write poorly and misunderstand what they’ve read. People do that with books, and they misspeak and misheard live conversations. Some of us are astonishingly accomplished at misunderstanding what people say. There ought to be annual awards for that level of skill.

And the socials have another aspect that complicates communication— anonymity.

I had an interaction with a new follow on Twitter/X, which I noticed and returned the follow even though the profile and activity were sparse and a little sus. I played the Benefit of the Doubt card this time—not my usual strategy. She slid into my DMs saying she wanted to be my friend (also sus). I say “she” because that’s how the profile was set up, but I can’t confirm that. I found two other profiles with the same or similar names, images, and profile descriptions, so I figured I wasn’t dealing with an honest individual. But I didn’t ignore her this time.

She DMed me in an overly friendly way, so I asked about the username, which didn’t fit her name or profile. It was like Cindy @kergu_addict. I asked what @kergu_addict referred to. She said it was just something she filled in earlier. I responded by praising the Lord’s mercy and goodness and asking if she knew Him. That question was ignored.

The next day after another DM checking up on me, I told her she needed in-person friends. Online connections can’t keep up with daily living. She responded with one of those statements you see in spam, like it was cut from two separate sentences.

“I’m not sure what you’re saying,” I said. “In person, we have proximity–people in the same room. We can talk with our voices and body language, and that’s a big difference. Online, we can only type and wait for the other person to read our message.”

“So that you wish you could find someone like that?” she asked.

“I have people like that,” I said. “I also have a close relationship with Jesus Christ. Do you have a Bible? Do you know something about Jesus?”

“I’m an atheist. I believe in what I do.”

“You don’t have to stay that way. This life, this world, are not there is. We were made for eternity.”

“Why? Don’t you believe in what you’re doing?”

“Because God, the creator of everything, and Jesus, the incarnation of God, are real. I believe in them because they exist. It’s reality.”

“Of course, I respect you. Faith is a good thing.”

She unfollowed me after that, which is what I expected. I wonder if anything I said will stay with whoever is on the other side.

What else can we look into?

Fantasy: The Queen of Ebenezer is “a dreamlike but intense story of two lost teenagers trying to find their way through a mysterious swamp—and that’s just the beginning of what they’re trying to find.” Gina Dalfonzo talks to author K. B. Hoyle about her latest novel.

Novels: John Wilson reminisces about his early novel reading in light of “Joseph Epstein’s just-published book The Novel, Who Needs It? If, like me, you are an incorrigible reader of novels, you should make haste to acquire it. . . . Most readers besotted with ‘the novel,’ as I am, will get their money’s worth.”

Music: Ted Gioia on how musicians gave the ancient world law, taken from his new book Music to Raise the Dead. The whole story isn’t spelled out and remains unclear, but “it’s indisputable that ancient communities frequently turned to people outside of the ruling class for their laws.”

Photo: Bomber gas station, Milwaukie, Oregon. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Reading for Fun or Bragging Rights, Language Usage, and More

I intend to read more books this year, but since I didn’t quite track how many I read last year, I don’t have an actual number to aim for this year. Goodreads has 23 on last year’s list, which includes several manga. Not sure those count, and a number of books isn’t my goal anyway. A number of pages would be more accurate.

I bought a few Christmas gifts for this purpose, and Tom Holland’s Dominion is 542 dense pages. That will take me a while to get through and in no way diminishes my enjoyment or education for being only one book. (I should take notes too.)

Writer Max Liu read a poetry anthology over two years, “each morning in the four minutes it took my coffee to brew. It was a wonderful reminder that reading is never about quantity and always about the quality of time you spend with a text.” He encourages all of us to read well and for fun, not to meet some goal. (via Joel Miller)

Christian Poetry: How would you define Christian poetry? What about a poem would make it Christian? In a new anthology, Christian Poetry in America (which I bought last month), part of that definition is placing “imitation and tradition over originality and self-expression.”

War in Ukraine: “Someone said it’s essential for Ukraine to win as it would give Russia a chance to rethink its values and undergo cleansing and much-needed change. We pray for it.”

Self-Absorbed Much? A new book is coming on the dangers of social media. The Wolf in Their Pockets is written to pastors to help them minister to “those whose online influences have filled them with cynicism and contempt.”

What’s in Icelandic? An Icelandic archaeologist and journalist is arguing that the Icelandic language was seeded with a lot of Celtic and Gaelic words from Irish and Scottish settlers. (via ArtsJournal)

Photo: Santa’s #1 reindeer, Magic Forest, Lake George, New York. 1996. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Pastoral Yoda Tweeting: Wise You Think You Are, Do You?

If you’ve read any social media for long, you’ve run across the proverbial, possibly deep, possibly pithy statement from someone who wants to drop the truth on the world. When a Christian leader does this on Twitter, that’s called a pastor yoda tweet.

This isn’t the same as tweeting a quotation from a quotable writer, but it may be a statement made by one such quotable writer on his own account. He may even be quoted himself. Tim Keller quotes from his own books in an effort to say something strong that has a context that can been explored. Here are good examples of pastors and leaders who aren’t quoting themselves.

Ronnie Martin: “It has never not been our moment. #thechurchthatjesusbuilds”

Also Ronnie Martin: “A quiet, without a calm. These are times when ‘the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding’ is desperately needed for both personal comfort, and public compassion.”

Issac Adams: “A commitment to forbear with someone is a commitment, in no small part, to not pick nits.”

David Paul Tripp: “Today you face war, no, not with the people in your life, but a war of kingdoms, fought in your heart, that will not be fully settled until you’re on the other side.”

But of course there are those who would like to tweet proverbial wisdom and fail.

The Happy Rant guys have talked about good and bad tweeting a few times. Here’s one episode that talks about pastor yoda tweeting and also features a story about John Piper speaking to a crowd that completely misunderstood him. Here’s a recent one in which they worry about too much yoda tweeting.

Earlier this month, Taylor Burgess explained it well, “Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like you’ve got to be at least 40 before you drop one of those ‘young pastor, [insert wise proverb]’ tweets. Err’body out here trying to be Yoda when most of us are Attack-of-the-Clones Anakin.”

Twitter Mob Turns on Its Own

People who know nothing about the Bible seem to know a few verses, such as “Judge not lest ye be judged,” but the young, bright users of the Internet will want to think those words through and apply them before a social media mob over takes them. Because (sorry for the remedial) Jesus wasn’t condemning judgement in toto. He was saying, “For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.”

To put it another way, if you call out people for cultural offenses, you put yourself at risk for being called out for the same.

This week, a YA author, who led Twitter mobs against perceived social injustices, has had the mob turn on him. He participated in this outcry:

[A] campaign based on misunderstanding and exaggeration led the author Amélie Zhao to take the unusual step of agreeing to cancel the publication of Blood Heir, her hotly anticipated debut novel, which was set to be the first in a trilogy. Advance reading copies had already been sent out. But an angry and underinformed subset of YA Twitter decided that a racially ambiguous character in Blood Heir was black, or this fictional universe’s equivalent of black—the character had “bronze” skin and “aquamarine” eyes—and that therefore certain things that character said and did constituted harmful tropes. (YA Twitter has very conservative norms pertaining to what characters of different ethnicities are allowed to say or do.) The fact that Zhao is ethnically Chinese, is an immigrant to the U.S., and had written Blood Heir in part as a commentary on present-day indentured servitude in Asia didn’t offer her much protection.

Now he has pulled his own novel from publication, having run afoul of his own tribe of trolls.

Jesse Singal (quoted above) notes that this outrage may be warranted or at least understandable if it came from readers who had read the books, but this outrage flames up from shallow reviews, tweets, or public comments before books are even released.

“Young-adult books are being targeted in intense social media callouts, draggings, and pile-ons—sometimes before anybody’s even read them,” Vulture‘s Kat Rosenfield wrote in the definitive must-read piece on this strange and angry internet community. The call-outs, draggings, and pile-ons almost always involve claims that books are insensitive with regard to their treatment of some marginalized group, and the specific charges, as Rosenfield showed convincingly, often don’t seem to warrant the blowups they spark—when they make any sense at all.

(via Prufrock News)

Who Would Read a Twitter Feed in Book Form?

New Hampshire professor Seth Abramson has put in many hours following the news on President Trump, updating his readers with tweets like these:

  1. [Aug 15, 2018, 2:55 PM] (NOTE) As to Bruce Ohr, who is currently employed by the federal government, Trump’s THREAT to revoke his security clearance—which would make him doing his job impossible, and might lead to his termination—is, given the “grounds” Trump has spoken of on Twitter, WITNESS TAMPERING. [93 replies 2,191 retweets 4,133 likes]
  2. (NOTE2) Trump is AWARE that Bruce Ohr is about to testify before House Republicans (see below) and he is seeking to INFLUENCE his testimony, as his statements on Twitter make clear, with this THREAT against him. Mueller will undoubtedly investigate this. [Link to The Hill, “House GOP prepares to grill DOJ official linked to Steele dossier”] [25 replies 777 retweets 1,728 likes]
  3. (NOTE3) A key national security expert for MSNBC just said on-air, “This is quite clearly designed to send a chilling effect to all of those who would criticize Donald Trump or his administration that this will not be tolerated.” Do people realize that, as to Ohr, that’s a CRIME? [28 replies 677 Retweets 1,801 Likes ]
  4. Seth Abramson Retweeted Donald J. Trump
    (NOTE4) This tweet is now evidence of a federal felony: @realDonaldTrump [link to this tweet]
    <<Bruce Ohr of the “Justice” Department (can you believe he is still there) is accused of helping disgraced Christopher Steele “find dirt on Trump.” Ohr’s wife, Nelly, was in on the act big time – worked for Fusion GPS on Fake Dossier. @foxandfriends>>
    [35 replies 1,028 retweets 2,240 likes]
  5. (NOTE5) People do not yet realize—but soon will—that Trump has just made as big a mistake as he made in firing Comey. You *cannot* threaten the job of a witness against you in a federal investigation and SAY ON TWITTER that your reason is that he will offer testimony against you.

Now, Abramson is shopping around a proposal “to ‘bookify’ my feed.”

According to the proposal, the book will be based off of edited and rewritten versions of his Twitter threads—a conceit, Abramson declares, “whose time has come.” The book will create a “comprehensive, chronological review of the Trump-Russia case by transforming my Twitter ‘threads’ into prose.”

“A book of this sort is daring,” he writes. “Few if any have leveraged the advantage that books offer in collating, organizing, and amplifying in narrative form an intensely followed Twitter feed.”

This looks like an incredible waste of every resource devoted to it, but I think I’ve seen similar wasted efforts in printed books. Not that there’s anything daring about it, except that writing any book believing people will buy or read or both feels daring. Of course, there’s the daring of the carefully planned tightrope walk over Niagara and the daring of the spur-of-the-moment motorcycle jump into the Grand Canyon. [via Prufrock News]

Author Sued, Internet Mocks

“Seth Grahame-Smith, author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Unholy Night (among other titles), is being sued by Hachette Book Group for breach of contract,” reports Locus Online this week. Hachette says they agreed to publish two new books from Grahame-Smith after publishing Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter in 2010, and they did receive one manuscript, but the second one, after some months delay, was, according to The Guardian, “too short and substandard, ‘in large part an appropriation of a 120-year-old public domain work’ (unnamed, but presumably 1897’s Dracula).”

As a result, Twitter users are running with their own ideas for .

More examples:

Twitter’s Quiet Suppression

For months, the news on Twitter has been that they don’t know how to monetize their platform of 232 million users. We’ve seen some advertising and promoted messages, but apparently they don’t make enough money. Ian Schafer suggests Twitter and its many critics don’t know what kind of company it actually is.

Maybe Twitter is deciding that it’s identify is to censor in the name of social justice.

For years, social media companies have been besieged by a new wave of progressive advocacy groups who demand restrictions on political speech under the guise of preventing “online abuse.” These are the groups who now make up Twitter’s dystopianly-named “Trust and Safety Council.”

That council has acted within the last few hours to suspend popular conservative tweeter Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain). Before this, they were slowing down the use or discovery of certain hashtags, as described below.

Breitbart.com argues for organization for all of us.

Conservatives and cultural libertarians are the most likely constituency to rise up, as they are the ones being predominantly targeted, but this is really a battle that should be taken up by all social media users. The Twitters and Facebooks of the world are not like the media empires of old; they are entirely reliant on users. Properly organised, users could hold them to account, in a way that would make investors sit up and listen — but they are not yet properly organised.

Writers on the Internet

Sean Minogue writes about writers using social media for better or for worse.

Unreachability and self-seriousness used to define many of our best-known authors, but the public appetite for writerly swagger in both old and new media is at an all-time low. Jonathan Franzen, for example, continues to spark minor firestorms with his pooh-poohing of Twitter: “I see people who ought to be spending time developing their craft […] making nothing and feeling absolutely coerced into this constant self-promotion,” he said on BBC Radio 4’s Today program. Franzen is behind the curve, but not because he doesn’t like Twitter. It’s his fundamental misunderstanding of social media that makes his opinions so quaint.

In the end, social media are just other platforms for authors to speak or ignore as they wish.

Dusty cobwebbed old underwood typewriter

#TenThingsNotToSayToAWriter

Twitter is channelling writer angst, gripes, and chuckles over things people say to established writers.

“Oh, you’re a writer? When I retire, I want to write a book too.”

“So are you still writing or are you working now?”

“I really like your work! Will you write for us? Oh, we don’t pay.”

How do you spell conflabigation? You’re a writer, aren’t you?

I love your work. It’s just like, oh, that other guy, you know?

And then there’s this one from Guy Gavriel Kay.