Blog Post #9

Andrew Fitzgerald: Adventures in Twitter fiction

https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_fitzgerald_adventures_in_twitter_fiction/transcript?language=en 

This talk discusses the creation and the relevance of real- time story telling. The speaker, Andrew Fitzgerald, explains how new formats often create new stories. He starts with the example of how Radios were a new medium in the 1930s and how the radio connected thousands of people to listen to something happening in real time. He also discusses the new format of Twitter, and how this created 140- character or less stories, in both fiction and nonfiction. Fitzgerald discusses how with this new market, authors are able to receive instant feedback from their audience. He discusses that an author can tailor stories to the needs of his audience because there is no longer any middle man, or publisher between him and his audience. He discusses how this allows the audience to have a large impact on the actual creation of the story. In one instance an author tweeted the first line of her new book and her audience commented their own personal perspective of what they think should happen next. This gave the audience a lot of control on how they think the story should be played out. Fitzgerald proceeded to discuss a new trend known as "twitter fiction." Twitter Fiction is when people create parody twitter accounts for characters or people in real life and tweet things how they assume that person would tweet. The example used in the video is a foul mouthed parody of Chicago Mayor, Rahm Emanuel. Fitzgerald discusses how this is able to interact with the real world while also preserving a flexible identity and anonymity. 

Fitzgerald does a good job of interacting with the crowd. His purpose is to explain, and he does so in a light hearted way. Fitzgerald is a member of the News and Journalism team from Twitter, so he is very credible with his information. The audience can tell that this is a subject that Fitzgerald has witnessed and understands. Fitzgerald does a great job of showing examples of what he is describing. He uses examples that the reader can relate to or has most likely encountered or seen something similar to. A negative of his argument is that his topic is just not a main issue. His topic is interesting, but has no real substance, so it is important that he gives it meaning. He is able to give it meaning through his use of emotion. He does not use strong emotions for this is not a serious issue, but he makes it seem interesting by using a sense of fascination. This allows the reader to also connect with what he is saying. 

I chose this video because I was intrigued by the title. I use twitter and I was interested to see how it had an impact on storytelling. This talk did not discuss tragedy or pity, but it did discuss duality. Fitzgerald identified how something can be viewed online from a number of different perspectives and how these perspectives can cause a duality on one topic. Also, he explains how the lines of fiction and nonfiction can blur together creating a sense of duality.