“Teju Cole has a history of innovative story telling on Twitter and has now released a lengthy, straight-to-Twitter essay. BuzzFeed spoke with Cole about his new essay, the benefits of Twitter as a …”
What made you decide that this specific essay would be best presented in this medium?
Teju Cole:I’ll answer that by saying I didn’t think this essay could be “best” presented in this medium, but I asked the opposite question: Why does a serious longform investigative piece have to be in print in a major magazine? In various parts of West Africa, there are different iterations of the idea that “white people like paper so much that they even wipe their butts with it.” You know, you spend your life staring at paper, you spend paper money, proof of ownership of everything is on paper, you fill your house with paper, and when you die, the announcement is in the paper.
I love paper too. I love print. But maybe not everything has to be on it. And in the case of Twitter (and, before that, blogging), I just feel so strongly that there’s an audience here, and audience that deserves to be treated with the same seriousness as the paper crowd.
A Piece of the Wall (Twitter timeline)
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