WONK

Twitter Project Update

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We at wonkWeb thought that we’d be remiss if we were to let another moment pass without an update on our twitter poem project. For the record, the project started out brilliantly. We received two very well crafted lines of the poem from, first, @EcDevGuyRick and then from @linoleumbob. Each seemed to offer a different insight into how social media is changing the way we all interact. It seemed like, to blatantly continue the metaphorical twitter cliché, that the birds were chirping happily on a beautiful spring day. But, then it happened. An unexpected frost. A frost so heavy and complete that all the tweeting stopped. Actually, that’s a little dramatic and, also, not completely true. It’s possible that the truth is that the wonkWeb editor (it seems fruitless to mention names at this point) heading up the twitter poem project neglected to take into consideration the fact that, at the time, @yourwonk only had nine followers (unlike the 23 loyal and discerning followers that we now boast). Given our follower statistics, the turnout for the poem project was actually impressively high (on a percentage basis). If you don’t have a calculator or a grade 4 student near by, I’ll do the math for you: twenty-two percent! With our high ratio of contributions to followers, it seems as though waiting for a few more followers might have been a good idea after all. To put it another way, I guess we could say that we should have put a little more network in our social networking.

It is worth mentioning that, in fairness to the contributors to the poem (as well as wonkWeb’s desperate need to not fail at this), the @yourwonk twitter poem project is not dead. I repeat, THE PROJECT IS ONGOING! Hopefully any of you reading the lines below will be inspired to continue the process. So, without further ado, something beautiful betrayed by a neglectful keeper:

We used to listen to the birds chirp, but then we learned to tweet

and now we can’t hear the person for all the people we meet

Some say we tweet of freedom some say we tweet for fame

yet I feel the tweets are hiding us behind a self-preserving (screen) name

Once again, a big thank you to @EcDevGuyRick and @linoleumbob for bringing the poem as far as it has come. If I failed to mention it before, the project is still a go, so, for the rest of us, feel free to keep the poetry coming and to be the next step in the process of collectively making poetry.

In the mean time, we can all look forward to wonk6 which is (still/finally) in the works. The tentative theme is children’s writing/art. If you are a child who writes, know a child who writes, are a writer who writes about children or any combination of the above, please see the submissions tab for details on having your work published in wonk6.