What are you doing?

Does this question sound familiar? If it does, you are probably on Twitter. If it doesn’t, you would probably be able to answer it, moment for moment, day after day. A rising number of people write hypertexts called tweets or blogs these days and share them with whoever has access to the internet and is willing to read them. This idea has been said to be new, revolutionary even. What would be revolutionary is that I do not know whom I am sharing this text with. However, writing texts in order to share them with family and friends has a long tradition. This morning, I came across an interesting episode in the inspiring biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Ms. Beecher’s life as an author began when she wrote little texts, often sketches and little poems about everyday events. This type of texts came to be known as “parlour literature”. It occurred to me this morning that tweets and blogs might be seen as “parlour literature” of the 21^st century.