Can a hundred Neil Gaiman-imitating twitterers produce anything worth reading?
By Laura Miller Oct. 23, 2009 | Last week, BBC Audiobooks America announced that it would sponsor the creation of a story via Twitter feed, using a first sentence written by author Neil Gaiman as the seed and inviting the public to collaborate in completing it, one 140-character passage at a time. The experiment was widely pronounced “cool,” as such things usually are, then promptly forgotten by everyone but the participants — again, as such things usually are. The several dozen people who contributed to the story seemed to have fun, and perhaps that’s all that really matters. A Web 2.0 version of the old surrealist parlor game known as “exquisite corpse,” the twittered story was intended as a publicity stunt for BBC Audiobooks America’s line of “distinctive single-voiced and full-cast dramatized audiobooks,” and surely succeeded at that. Yet BBCAA intends to publish an audio-only version of the story, read by Gaiman himself, which makes this as apt an occasion as any to raise some qu
