Who is the Man Behind Nein Quarterly?

In part one of their conversation Paul Holdengraber and Eric Jarosinski (the man behind the beloved Twitter feed, Nein) discuss the art of the aphoristic Tweet, the exotic nature of an actual phone call, and problems with the word “lecture.”

Eric Jarosinski on the phone call as exotic…
You don’t know what you’re interrupting, essentially. I think we’ve gotten used to not being interrupted by communication; and getting to a text message and email when you’ve got time to read it. It’s almost like stopping by someone’s house unannounced.

Eric Jarosinski on Twitter as a notepad for ideas…
It’s much less about real two-way communication these days. I spend more time writing Twitter than reading it. I don’t try to have conversations on it. For me, it’s actually more about testing out ideas and experimenting with little forms. It’s more of a notepad with feedback in a lot of ways. That’s at least how I see it right now.

Eric Jarosinski on how to Twitter…
I really never know how people read these things, I just know that when you’re writing—we were talking about interruptions before—I see all these tweets as little textual interruptions. Because typically people aren’t seeking out your feed and then reading through it. It’s popping up, along with any number of other things that aren’t connected to it on their own particular timeline. So I try to write everything as a self-contained little unit. You know, one message, one bottle. And again, part of that technique is what you’re referencing right there. In regard to something that just happened to me just a minute beforehand, but the idea that it can stand alone without any direct reference to that.

Eric Jarosinski on the value of concision…
I think of what I’m doing very much as a type of craft. Concision is always the goal. When I’ve gone back over the things that I wrote in the beginning most of it’s not very good. Some of it, the ideas are ok, but poorly executed. And that’s how I see what I’ve been learning over the last few years, bringing a certain rhythm to what I’m writing, and certainly working with concision. Because I think a lot of what people like about Twitter in general is, in fact, a certain elegance of concision—that’s not always there obviously, but that can be. Because I think there’s a lot that’s said about people’s short attention spans, obviously, and distraction, and so on—but there’s a real appreciation for form on Twitter, I’ve found. Often the things I’ve written that most people have responded to are things that are very carefully constructed. And often using classical rhetoric in its construction. And I think that there’s something that still very much speaks to people in those kinds of formulations.

NEXT WEEK: PART TWO WITH ERIC JAROSINSKI