Tweet

Some would say that in our Web 2.0 World
the basic measure of a unit of thought
would be something like a tweet
sent by those all a-twitter over the precise
(under 140 characters)
Oulipian constraint of the trendy format
or that the basic unit of SMS poetic measure
no longer has anything to do with thought per se
but with how much information you can
selectively filter into your "reader"
at any given time

but already there are artists playing
with the potential of tweet poetics
and in the sphere of worldwide blogging
there is what some would call RSS Poetics:

In generative digital literature, it is said that the work has the last word because the author and the reader are suddenly in the same position. The work is realized only in the instant that it materializes. But in this culture of feeds and streams, it is not the author that has the last word as in the classical model nor the work that has the last word as in the postmodern model of generative production. It is the reader who has the last word, because the work – after it is released from the control of the author and dissolved into a model of generative distribution – lands with the reader and accumulates there in a completely individualized shape. Not only is the final outcome individualized by becoming attached to the reader as s/he experiences the work, but the work becomes individualized as it blends with and is absorbed into the stream of information that is already coming to the reader. This is why it gets beyond the “work” – the work itself dissolves into experience. It is not only about remixing the world or the work, but remixing the world into the work, and the work into the world. The work enters a form so highly standardised it can travel anywhere, into and out of any other model. It is not only XML, it is WOAML, work of art markup language, art markup language, art, language. It is the moment when art dissolves into experience, when art and life finally merge: the work meets the totality of the world and finds it can go anywhere.

Is this indicative of a reverse-writerly theory that turns Barthes on his head or is it more like a theory-play where remixology meets pleasure of the text?

---

Metadata: philosophy, writing, remix, tweet, twitter, blogging, poetics, RSS