By Theresa Schliep

I watch scary movies through the cracks between my fingers, if at all. I love scary movies: the demons, the pop up scares, the prophetic music. I just scare too easily to watch them dead on.

I am also not the ideal movie-watcher. I fall asleep in the middle of the plot of most movies. Other times I don’t really want to know about the middle plot, and I’d rather read the Wikipedia to know how it ends.

I blame my attention span. Ever since I joined the internet and made various social media accounts, my attention span has grown ever narrower. Most unfortunately, I found it more and more difficult to sit down and read a book.

I considered myself an avid reader, a bibliophile, as my mom would like to say. When I was younger, I didn’t just read, I consumed literature. I was indiscriminate with my choices, too. I read everything, from young adult literature to English female novelists, from memoirs of great historical figures to critically acclaimed 20th century American novels.

I grew ashamed of my insidious inability to sit down with a book and read it. I was reading novels less and less, instead deferring to quick 2,000 word news stories. Then I found myself overwhelmed by even those. I used to be the girl who would finish a book for class way ahead of everyone else.

One day, scrolling through Twitter, I saw someone had retweeted a tweet from a user talking about a ghost experience in his apartment, a story come to be known as “Dear David.” I immediately doubted the veracity of such claims: his bio, after all, said he had a book coming out soon.

But after looking through his profile, I was hooked by this story. He tweeted in real time, as events took place. Every video of his cat staring at something we can’t see, every photo of something that looked oddly like a baby with a deformed head, every audio file with a strange sound emitting from his apartment at the weird hours of the morning — every incident, he tweeted out.

I was obsessed! He tweets about it enough for me to keep checking for updates. He doesn’t tweet about it too much that its hard to keep up. I found myself checking his Twitter pretty frequently. It was a welcome distraction to my readings for my English classes, writing my Ram articles, or editing pieces.

His Storify thread now has 1.5 million views.

Initially, I harbored some harsh feelings towards this new story-telling phenomenon. I thought it was a blasphemous attack on the traditional literary form, prying on our natural and ever dwindling short attention spans. It is only made to be consumed and commodified, and there is no value behind this narrative form.

But after I watched the Conjuring — an admittedly and decidedly more artistically crafted story series — I grew to value story telling on Twitter.

Not created so decades of English classes would dissect every word, the “Dear David” thread uses Twitter’s structure: 140 words, tweeted presumably contemporaneously to whatever the events are being detailed. The story goes on hiatus when he sleeps, or when he’s traveling.

There’s no literary value behind the Dear David story on Twitter, nor other Twitter threads that gain significant traction. But it isn’t entirely unlike other literary modes in history. Serialization was pretty common throughout the 19th century, and novels like Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield and George Eliot’s Middlemarch — a tantalizing Victorian tale, by the way — used serialization to interrupt their narratives, and perhaps excite readers.

It is an effective way to scare people. And who doesn’t like a cheap thrill?