Stroll City Begins Tomorrow — join in the Toronto Twitter observations

Long before I got a smart phone I would text out short observations of what I was seeing as I passed through Toronto to a group of friends. Sometimes these were extraordinary things, sometimes just everyday. The form of the text — short bursts of info — was a nice and concise way of creating snapshots of the city. When the iPhone and Twitter came along, I stopped sending texts (possibly to the relief of some of those friends) and started tweeting through the city. I treat Twitter, at times, as a kind of public notebook and a place to record observations and feelings about Toronto, and then share them (which often leads to other folks tweeting their own feelings and knowledge about a place). It’s been a lot of fun, and invaluable, as many of these tweets and responses have ended up in pieces of long-form writing and, eventually, my book Stroll (the inspiration for this project). I hope you’ll join in starting next week as some of my Toronto tweets will appear in a new Twitter feed and on screens in all the subway stations by tweeting back your own observations, many of which will also appear on the screens.

From September 21 to October 5, Shawn Micallef, the author of Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto (as well as EYE WEEKLY columnist and Spacing editor) and flâneur extraordinaire, will tweet his Toronto discoveries through the Twitter handle  @strollcity in addition to his own feed. Torontonians are encouraged to respond to his tweets with comments and their own discoveries @strollcity over the two weeks.

TTC riders in the city can tweet their replies to Micallef’s texts, only to see them magically appear shortly thereafter in an ever-changing spot that will run every 10 minutes on the Onestop Media TTC network of screens, visible to over 1 million subway commuters daily. We’re hoping to get as many people involved as possible in this city-wide, interactive media-art project so we can get tweeted findings from all over the city.

Please follow Stroll City at twitter.com/StrollCity, and tweet your findings starting September 21!

Photo by Sweet One.