![]() She and others credit tech entrepreneur Marc Andreesen and Chris Dixon with coining and popularizing the term in 2014, though she says the word was used before then, as early as 2008, to describe any flurry of Twitter activity, threaded or not. Emily Brewster, an editor at Merriam-Webster, points out that "tweetstorm" isn't officially in their dictionary yet, but it's being considered. We should step back here to briefly discuss the history of the words "thread" and "storm" in relation to tweeting. ![]() In the midst of unprecedented political discontent, with every new headline seeming to merit a thread from an armchair expert, it is time for us to assess the pros and cons of the tweetstorm, the thread, the whatever and figure out just what it all means. I, myself, go back and forth over whether my propensity to thread is going to lose me followers, or even worse, my job. Just this week, Deadspin called tweetstorms about Trump conspiracies the "the Infowars of the left."ĭepending on your state of mind, they're the terrible feed-clogging stuff of blowhards, a sign of male privilege, or a new art form. Since as early as 2014, outlets like BuzzFeed have been saying they must be stopped. Levinson is just the latest to wander into the jungle that is the Internet's collective reservoir of emotion concerning the tweet thread, or the tweetstorm, or whatever you want to call it. Levinson says the "manthreading" piece, which she meant as a joke, turned out to be the most controversial story of her career, "which is funny," she says, "because I've written about drug addiction." God Bless America, and all nations.- Eric Garland December 11, 2016 Here is the first tweet in a 127-tweet thread/storm Levinson called out in her essay: "They are typically 'intellectual' dribblings from men who love Explaining Things To Me (essentially a subtype of Online Mansplaining)," she wrote. In her piece, Levinson defined manthreading as when men, usually obnoxious men, do it. "Threading" is the practice of repeatedly replying to your own tweets on Twitter, without mentioning yourself, in order to create a (usually rapid) series of tweets "threaded" together that can weave a longer narrative than 140 characters ever could. (It happened.) "Yeah, I mean people were just tweeting at me that they wanted to kill me, and stuff like that." "I had to alert security at work," she half-jokes, as if that really didn't happen. ![]() When you hear Alana Hope Levinson talk about the death threats she got late last year, in response to a Gizmodo story she wrote railing against " manthreading," she speaks so lackadaisically, you could almost forget how serious it all was. It is time for us to assess the pros and cons of the tweetstorm, the thread, the whatever and figure out just what it all means. ![]()
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