A novel approach to tweet street

The art of storytelling has manifested in a number of forms. After literary texts, folk songs, cinema and photographs, social networks act as powerful mediums of representation.

 In an information age, it is Twitter that serves a space for news and views, and of late, it has become a site for reproducing novels.

After authors like David Mitchell and James Meek in the West, the trend has caught on in India, with Devdutt Pattanaik and Meghana Pant decimating the ‘Mahabharata’, which consists of one lakh verses and 86 chapters, to a chunks of tweets of 140 characters.

‘Metrolife’ talks to a few bibliophiles about how they view the act of tweeting a novel and whether it is a triumphant or turbulent endeavour. 

Rakhi, a graduate from Christ University, says that tweeting epics and mythologies on social media seems to be the current generation’s way of telling stories. “I personally believe that it is good to tweet books to catch the reader’s eye and keep the general interest flowing. However, to completely subvert them for marketing and selling for pop-fictional purposes is wrong.”

She adds,“Taking the case of epics particularly, there are millions of writers out there, who are mining the epics in depth, revisiting them and upholding them before the contemporary society but epics are much more than tweets. So a balance needs to be maintained.
If a trend presents itself where the balance is distorted, then the trend needs to be stopped. Most young people are quite clueless about the actual intricacies of epics because their knowledge is off K-serials and retweets.” 

Rakhi, who was one of those who was online while Pattanaik was tweeting ‘Mahabharata’ (in 36 tweets), adds, “There was nothing creative about summarising and there was nothing new in what he did. I was quite disappointed in the beginning but then since I saw the reactions and the way in which they were trending, I realised that most people didn’t know the stories to begin with and the way of consumption today has changed.” 

Sanjana, another student, feels that creativity is killed while tweeting. “One of the most important things while telling a story is brevity. Anyone can ramble and retweet  for hours, but to make things interesting, and keep them clever and sharp is a skill. I’m not personally fond of the trend on Twitter. Epics are called so for a very specific reason and their richness lies in the long form, the charming details and analysing the ‘how’ and ‘why’ aspects. As few as 140 characters cannot do justice to them. It’s depriving the readers of something enjoyable,” she said. 

However, she adds that ‘twitterising’ novels will not lead to anyone putting a book down in India. “I don’t see people putting down a book in our country and the good thing that can be said of the ‘#TweetABook’ trend is that it might go on to encourage people to actually read the book. However, that is not a great way to tell stories.” 

Meena, a student of mass communication, describes the whole process as a subjective endeavour. She feels ‘twitterisation’ of novels shouldn’t be disregarded as a whole as it is a way of expanding one’s horizon to a new venture. Tamizh, a professional in a City-based start up, says that as he is not a bookworm, tweets wouldn’t encourage him to pick up a book.

While a few of them feel that this is a good way to encourage people who don’t read, others fear that ‘retweets’ may replace the reading culture.Anushka Sivakumar