Twitter: Literature's Friend or Foe?

The internet is always the 'bad guy' when it comes to books. Google Books and Amazon's 'Look Inside' feature and a number of online literature sites mean that there is a scary amount of writing available for free online, made all the worse by pirate website selling electronic editions for free or at a price but with no royalties going to the author. Furthermore, there has been criticism that Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing means that there is no longer a filter and that "poorer quality" manuscripts (defining that might be tricky...) are selling more than books sold through the traditional process because the price of the former so heavily undercuts the price of the latter, many of them going up for free to attract attention.

There's no denying that there's a problem and one that publishing communities around the world are trying to lobby against but with the bad stuff, there are more opportunities out there for writers than ever before. Twitter is the ultimate free promotional tool. Everyone is using it, whether its passively, actively or somewhere in-between, meaning authors and their publicity teams have immediate access to a large number of consumers at any one time creating what I like to call, the E.L. James Effect. Of course the offering free samples and distributing them widely aspect of the internet is nothing new; it's an age-old marketing tool that the web only makes easier.

One question of course is whether or not Twitter and its social media friends actually "degrade" writing in themselves - firstly, by helping make literature so quickly consumable (be that through either lack of quantity or "quality"), and secondly, by encouraging misuse and disregard of language in preference of brevity or, more commonly, compactness.

To be honest, I think I need to take a step back as I'm getting perilously close to referring to tweets as "literature" but some people have beaten me to it: "Twitterature" has been born... People have taken it upon themselves to thrust upon the world (thrust being the key word in the case of the large amounts of erotica surfacing on the web) 140-character, bite-sized nuggets of their own literary musings, poetry, novel extracts etc. How kind. There's even been a book on the phenomenon: Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books Re-told through Twitter by Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin, although the concept of literature on twitterature on literature makes my brain hurt a little...

While I'm not quite there yet with the whole 'tweets as literature' argument, we are no doubt swiftly becoming a faster-paced society that is constantly consuming, be it books or otherwise (Belgian chocolate waffle sandwiches in my case), and Twitter surely echoes that move in its briefness, quantity, immediacy and international scale. I guess it once again we're asking the famous question - what's more important: substance or style, quality or quantity?