Someone with a .co.uk address found this site after Googling “Richard Taruskin Twitter.” Is there any writer astride the Earth today, in any field, less suited to the 140-character limits of Tweets than the author of the 4,080-page Oxford History of Western Music? Richard Powers? Peter Matthiessen?
A little math…if each of those 4,080 pages has 800 words on it, and each word averages seven letters, that’s about 5,600 characters (800 X 7), and there’s probably another 800 or so spaces between those words and punctuation marks, so that gives us 6,400 characters (5,600 + 800) on a given page, which is the equivalent of 142 Tweets (6,400/140). So to write the Oxford History of Western Music on Twitter would require 579,360 Tweets (4,080 X 142). Someone needs to start that today.