“I love it when old people blog.”

rkb:

Can you imagine saying that to Margaret Atwood?

From her Powells.com interview:

Atwood: If you go onto the website, www.yearoftheflood.com, you’ll see that there’s a Twitter feed on it. And my followers, who now number about seven and a half thousand from a cold start in August, can say some quite fun things to and about me, one of them being, “I love it when old people blog.” [Laughter]

So you can go on the Twitter feed, find the tweets, and you can go onto my blog and follow my book tour from the very beginning. When I appear in Seattle, that will be on my blog too.

Jill: Do you enjoy tweeting, shrinking things down to 140 characters?

Atwood: It’s a discipline. The real form of the tweet goes back to the telegraph.The real form of the tweet goes back to the telegraph. With the telegraph, you had to condense language because you paid by the letter or the word, I forget which. So it too used those condensed forms of language, although it could not be shared with all of those people at once. But as a thing that you write… I’d say twittering isn’t exactly writing, it’s more like signaling. It’s more like semaphore.

You could say, “Well, we could write haiku on it,” which we could. But I don’t notice us doing that very much.

Jill: No, although there is someone who sends out recipes through Twitter.

Atwood: They must be fairly simple recipes.

Jill: I think they are, and also that she uses extremely condensed words and symbols, so even more like semaphore.

Atwood: She could also probably use TwitPic. Do you know what TwitPic is?

Jill: I don’t, no.

Atwood: You work on the net, and I know something you don’t! [Laughter] TwitPic is a tool whereby you can turn a photograph or a document into a url that you can put on your twitter entry. Whoever clicks on it then gets whatever it is that you’ve put up there. It will expand your world. Maybe. Maybe it’ll just give you one more thing to worry about.

That’s a fascinating take on Twitter.  These constraints aren’t new.  We just haven’t experienced them for quite some time because communication has become so inexpensive.