The fake BP Twitter feed's logo.
This week’s column in the print TIME looks at Twitter as a literary art form. No, seriously. With the emergence of satirical accounts like @BPGlobalPR, which has mercilessly flogged BP over the Gulf oil spill, the fake-Twitter account has come into its own as Twitter’s indigenous genre of fiction. What is Twitter lit good for? What are its distinctive properties and tropes? And whom should you be following? (My apologies, by the way, for omitting one of my favorites, the surreal stream-of-nut-gathering that is Common Squirrel.)
The column also covers @shitmydadsays, the Twitter feed that CBS is adapting into a fall sitcom. It obviously isn’t an avowedly fake account in the same way that, say, @shitmydarthsays or @DrSamuelJohnson is, but it follows some of the same rules—and I know that there are people out there who suspect writer Justin Halpern of embellishing it. I don’t know whether that’s so, and—as with David Sedaris and other past “controversies” over humorous narratives—I don’t much care. But if some other journalist wants to do the James Frey-style investigation into the purported tweets of someone’s septuagenarian dad, they’re welcome to.
There’s a whole world of fake- and quasi-fake-Twitter feeds out there I didn’t get to. (Is Sockington considered fake? And who is willing to tell him he is?) So if you have any favorites I left out, let us know in the comments.