Teju Cole tells a collective story on Twitter that isn’t a collective story at all. Alan Jacobs:

You can read the whole story here, under the title “Teju Cole orchestrates his Twitter followers into a collective short story,” but the really important thing to note about this event is that it wasnot a “collective short story” — though that’s what it appeared to be at the time. When I checked it out the story was about a dozen tweets in, and my assumption (which was also the assumption of thousands of others) was that Cole had gotten the story going and then was choosing the replies that in his view best moved the story along. Now that, I thought, was interesting.

But as it turned out the many people who submitted their own tweets in hopes of having them chosen as parts of the story were wasting their time: Cole had written the story in advance and was just asking some of his followers to tweet parts of it, making sure that the last word was given to a TV host with three times as many followers as Cole.

More Jacobs: “it wasn’t a ‘collective story’ and it wasn’t what some called it, an ‘experiment in narration.'” Read the rest.