How Has Twitter Changed the Role of the Literary Critic?

Published: October 29, 2013 -     The New York Times 

Each week in Bookends, two writers take on pressing and provocative questions about the world of books. This week, Adam Kirsch and Anna Holmes discuss social media’s effect on criticism.

By Adam Kirsch

Although some critics have taken to Twitter, it’s hard to find any actual practice of criticism there.

Adam Kirsch - Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

One of my favorite Twitter feeds reflects the mind of a man who has been dead for 300 years. Thanks to the efforts of Phil Gyford, a “creative technologist” based in London, I can regularly read tweeted passages from the classic diary of Samuel Pepys, a 17th-century Englishman whose observations about his career and family life are fascinating in their absolute mundanity. Thus in 2013, I receive updates from Pepys in 1660: “All the afternoon at home looking over my carpenters” or “So home, having drunk too much, and so to bed.” There is something remarkably soothing about such bulletins from the dead. They are a reminder that despite the self-important turbulence of the digital age, we are not so different from our ancestors. Like them, we are obsessed with family and career, money and pleasure.

Pepys, it is clear, would have been a natural Twitter user. He strikes exactly the note of innocent self-absorption that fills so many feeds with news of what people ate last night or how they felt this morning. But what about more literary writers of past eras — what would they have made of the world of social media, which builds communities even as it caters to egos? Charles Dickens, who edited magazines and toured around giving readings in addition to writing fiction, would surely have loved Twitter — another medium to facilitate his performance of himself, and another way for him to bathe in the audience’s love. Oscar Wilde, too, probably would have had hundreds of thousands of followers: so many of his best lines fit neatly into 140 characters. (Emily Dickinson, on the other hand, would not even have been on Facebook.)

At first glance, it seems that critics, in particular, should relish a tool like Twitter. Criticism is a kind of argument, and Twitter is excellent for arguing back and forth in public. Criticism is also a kind of reportage, and Twitter is an ideal way of breaking news. With many major events, from presidential debates to the Oscars, it is more informative and entertaining to follow them in real time on Twitter than it is to actually watch them. For all these reasons, journalists have been especially avid users of Twitter. 

More