The Culture Gab Fest is sponsored by Audible, offering more than 50,000 downloadable audiobooks.

CultureFest listeners can download a free audiobook by signing up for an Audible membership

at Audiblepodcast.com slash culturefest.

I'm Stephen Metcalf, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest,

Oh my God, Ugly People Can Sing, edition.

This is also the daily podcast from slate.com for Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009.

On today's program, we're going to talk about Twitter.

Is connectivity poverty?

The HBO original movie, Greg Gardens, certainly raccoons foraging through your living room, has to be poverty.

And Susan Boyle, a feel-good triumph or a lookist morality tale or both.

Joining me today are Slate's deputy editor, Julia Turner.

Hello, Julia.

Hi, Steve. Julia, did you like the vegan deputy editor, Julia Turner. Hello, Julia. Hi, Steve. Julia,

did you like the vegan treat? I liked the vegan treats. Stephen is feeding me vegan treats in a futile effort to convert me. So from now on, no more chocolate only carib. Dana, hello. Hello.

You liked the vegan treat. Oh, definitely. But we knew you would all along. Let's just go around the table on our first topic very quickly.

We've been tweeting, tweeting, whatever it is, twittering for two weeks now.

And we discovered it was a different experience than we thought going in.

Dana.

Are you going around to me? Yeah, let's just go around. Are you going to continue doing it? Are you going to drop it? Was it enervating, interesting? What do you, after two weeks of doing it, how do you feel about it? Whether I'll continue to drop it is an open question. I guess I'll just see how I feel after the Gab Fest and how much I miss doing it. But I will say that I completely resisted. I mean,

I loved it as an experiment, but I really resisted the format at first and went into it thinking, you know, this is the very name, Twitter, somehow condescends, you know, it sort of trivializes the writing that you're doing. And it just is so the opposite of how I conceive of myself as a writer, which is extremely discursive and not at all aphoristic and sort of brief.

Anyway, but to my surprise, I really enjoyed it. It's really fun. And I found that it sort of changed the metabolism of my writing in a strange way that after a few days, I just at some point had the liberating epiphany that we're doing this for work. So we don't have to decide why we're doing it or, you know, what our relationship to the form is. We just play around with it. And to my surprise, after a few days, I started occasionally having a thought and realizing, oh, that's a, that's a Twitter style bit of writing. Not something that needs to be expanded on, but just, you know, something worthy of twittering. It was as if that category emerged as a result of having played around with the board. So pleasantly surprised, jury's still out, may continue doing it, may not. May not continue doing it, but I would certainly continue to monitor people's streams. Because also, to my surprise, almost everything that I read that, you know, at least the people I know right, is interesting to me in some way. Whether it's banal or, you know, whether it's trying to be funny. I mean, I just, I just

like hearing what people are going to be. So you'll consume, but maybe not produce, making you

...