When Robert Frost was asked why he always wrote in verse and rhyme, the American poet replied that he just didn’t feel like playing tennis without a net. His later-born Austrian colleague Clemens J. Setz borrowed the image of this saying for the demise of the short message service Twitter, which was heralded by the lifting of the character limit. “I never expected that Twitter would disappear so quickly. It’s now called X and works completely differently… That’s a catastrophe, of course,” he writes in his Twitter-poetry treasure trove entitled “The universe in its own fur.”
The tennis image is also good because it can be expanded. Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter, all the boundaries of the playing field have become obsolete, the referees are sweating with fear, the ball throwing machines seem to have multiplied and are shooting with cannon balls instead of felt balls. Not to mention the bombardments from the audience. Tennis in general: the back and forth of this sport describes the dialogic principle of language very well. You can still hear it in your ears, the flop-pop conversation. What is shouted at you today when you open the X app sounds completely different.
