No One, Going Home, Should Cry: Haiku

No one...has to cry.
Etched brow mimics a stun'd vale.
Such bitter tears.

Mihaela Lica on Twitter, Haiku and Maria Puente

Mihaela Lica has written a commentary on Maria Puente's piece on the quality of Facebook and Twitter writing, which I commented on yesterday. Lica's commentary is titled, "Twitter is Haiku, if you Didn't Know it by Now". You can read it here.

I have written a comment on Lica's own comment on Puente's comment, and posted it on Lica's blog. I am reproducing my comment here below, just to give additional access to it, access under my control, which some readers might more easily gain:

"Greetings from Nairobi, Kenya.

I do appreciated your contribution to the on-going conversation regarding the quality of writing on Facebook and Twitter. I did mention in my own blog-post yesterday that Maria Puente's piece is a valuable piece of advice to all who would like to add value to their Facebook or Twitter contributions. Content is the real "King of Kongo", but it has to be one's own and it has to seek elevation beyond the mundane. ReTweets are other people's content, which we pass along. Pepy's diary entry on a bad ("down") day should not be today's standard "update" -- particularly when we are "up" and/or "about".

Still, the average social-networker (or social capitalist) does need a measure of orientation -- indeed, in view of all the water that has flowed under the bridge, re-orientation -- but is currently left, in this particular jungle, to his/her own Twittering devices. That is not the way the Great Conversation that's social networking is going to truly benefit from the angularity of our individual "takes" on the wonderful diversity that's the human condition.

I did also quote the Debby Weil "pearl" in my blog post yesterday, but her own contributions which you cite certainly do not measure up to her own stated standards or ideals, or to those that Maria Puente was clearly rooting for. We do need standards of quality, to shovel a large section of today's "diarists" out of the rut of mediocre articulation/cnversation.

Incidentally, let me say this and then I'm out of here, the Kobayashi Issa haiku that you quote does not -- certainly not in the English translation that I see -- meet the 5-7-5 standard which many of us are attempting to preserve today in Twitter. What do you say?"

Maria Puente's Art of Writing on Facebook or Twitter

Maria Puente bemoans the all-too-common habit of writing on Facebook and Twitter as though art, the art of writing, does not matter in those fora. She complains, "the modern status update is not always compelling reading." I cannot but agree with her entirely. In a recent twitter update I remarked that "content is the real King of Kongo." She puts it much more elegantly. Clearly, "Feeding the cat" or "Watching TV" is no one's king -- though, Puente concedes:

"To be fair, even great diarists of the past had bad days: Samuel Pepys, the Englishman whose journals clarified a big chunk of the 17th century for historians, sometimes had nothing more imaginative to say than: And so to bed."

Yet she wants something more: "Surely we could do better 350 years later?", she remarks.

Approvingly, she quotes Debbie Weil, author of The Corporate Blogging Book, who notes:

"Great blogging is great writing, and it turns out great Twittering is great writing — it's the haiku form of blogging."

And she, Puente, insists: "Funny, clever and sassy updates and tweets stand out because they are the exception. Boring, vapid or just TMI — too much information — updates often dominate in cyberspace."
Click here to read more

Further Reading:
1. Click on link to read: Ten Ways to Put Your Content in Front of More People.

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Aint my Iborian
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Telltale winds blow by.