At first, I felt that the dissatisfaction of reading a book of tweets was due to my expectation of the content. But then again, I even bought it without imagining what it would be like. Or maybe it’s because my taste in books doesn’t match the genre of a tweet collection book?
I don’t even have a particular taste in reading. But when I asked a friend to read the book I just bought, it turned out that his response was not much different from mine. After reading he said: “What is this book? Better to print it from twitter directly”. Finally, I felt that the book of tweets I had just bought was disappointing. But do I regret buying it? No, I don’t. At least I have a lot of comparisons from some of the books I have.
After almost 2 months of buying the book, I finally arrived at the last page. But don’t think I memorized the contents from start to finish. I skipped the preface. Some chapters I could already guess the contents. Many other pages I read quickly and some I jumped over to get to the last page without ever wanting to go back. What happened? I failed to find the main ideas and thoughts of the book. I also couldn’t draw any conclusions from the many words written in it.
What idea could be captured from a 140-character piece of writing? What can be conveyed by a collection of words that is only composed of 140 characters?
In my opinion, which does not have much knowledge about the world of writing or literature, a book is not just a collection of paper containing writings that are bound. A book is a text that expresses an idea or ideas that are unified between sentences. So if you read a book, you can definitely draw a big thread or main idea that is the core of the book.
Reading is a matter of taste. What we like may not necessarily be liked by others. And vice versa. But for me and maybe some people, reading a book that is nothing more than a collection of tweets will probably produce the same impression, which is shallow or even raw. It’s hard to get inner satisfaction when reading a book that only contains a collection of tweets. It’s like there is no whole process or journey that can be gone through from reading a collection of tweets.
Like food, tweet dishes are quite tasty but not nutritious and not filling. A tweet or a collection of tweets is often beautiful and intriguing, but to become a book feels like a premature baby. A book can indeed be born out of inspiration from social networks like twitter. But a book should not be a collection of tweets or short statuses on social networks.
A collection of tweets that are booked is not exactly called a book or if there is a similar but more extreme opinion, a collection of tweets is actually not worth publishing as a book. Besides being unsystematic, a collection of tweets also does not describe a process that can lead readers to draw conclusions. A collection of tweets is not only often poor in ideas but also lacks unity of meaning with each other. In fact, ideas and unity of meaning are needed by a text in a book.