Bernadette Geyer on The Social Media Model

Let’s face it. We’ve become adept at thinking in 140 character soundbites. Practiced in the art of the pithy or clever status update. One of the first things we do in the morning is jump on the social media sites and type in whatever comes to mind.  And if a phrase enters our brain mere minutes later, we’re back at our keyboard or on our cell phone Tweeting it. We’ll post a status update about how little time we have to write, but ignore the sheer volume of words we post on blogs, Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook. It seems, sometimes, our best thoughts are being scooped up and whisked away by a fleet-footed instant messenger.

In April, I participated in National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo), where poets commit to drafting a poem every day of the month. Just prior to that, I had joined with another online group of poets to do the same thing. In those two months, I drafted more than 60 poems. Aside from my amazement at the creativity I was able to muster, I realized, somewhere in the frenzy of NaPoWriMo, that I was Facebooking less. If a clever phrase came to mind, I rushed to my journal instead of the internet. Lines amassed and became poem drafts. My mind switched from viewing everything as a potential Tweet to viewing everything as a potential poem.

In the “resting” month following NaPoWriMo, I fell back into the routine of social media. But sometime in June, just as I was about to post a comment on a friend’s status update about dealing with the heat when you don’t have an air conditioner, I realized what I wanted to write would not fit in the comment field. Instead, I began typing it into a word document. What I wrote was a poem. A poem that would not have been written had I simply posted a short comment on my friend’s status update and left it at that.

I am not against social media. I love it. I would not have the creative community I do have if not for blogs and Facebook and Twitter. However, we poets should make the very lateral methodological jump from training our minds to think in Tweets, to training our minds to view those same situations in terms of potential material.

We need to harness our well-crafted thoughts for something more enduring than a status update.

Bernadette Geyer’s poem “Haunting” appears in LAR 7.