In the opening preamble for the forthcoming Fall 2009 Knight Letter, Mark Burstein says that my “first act as co-FF-editor was to create a Twitter stream at http://twitter.com/AliceAmerica as an alternate way to follow the blog…” While I’m slightly embarrassed that this was my inaugural motion, it is true that, if you use Twitter’s services, you can now follow @AliceAmerica for alerts from this blog and other notices.
If you are confused about why Twitter exists, and why the mainstream media seems so obsessed with mentioning it as often as possible, there is no reason for you to worry or change anything about your life. (I personally see the service neutrally, between the extreme loves and hates it has generated.) Twitter is basically a global text-messaging service, for posting public or private 140-character messages, and following the messages of your friends or celebrities, politicians and pundits. One of my favorite tweeters is 17th century London diarist Samuel Pepys, who recently wrote “My wife is mighty fine, and with a new fair pair of locks, which vex me, though like a foole I helped her the other night to buy them.” If you desired, you could set it up to receive @AliceAmerica’s messages on your mobile phone in hundreds of countries. I’ve also just created a twitter list of Carrollians at @AliceAmerica/carrollians – which I’ve embedded in the lefthand sidebar of this blog – to follow the various Carroll & Alice-related twitterings. Please e-mail us or comment below if you have any suggestions of more Carrollians that list should follow.
