Keeping It All In Perspective

One of my favorite people that I follow on Twitter is Genevieve Spencer.  Her tweets are extremely brief, and she writes pretty much exclusively about her day to day life.  Sometimes she just comments on the weather (“Snowed a little bit today”), other times she talks about school (“Played “I Spy” at school to-day. Teacher was late. I was the first one there.).  She never comments on current events or responds to other people’s tweets.

That’s because she’s dead.

@Genny_Spencer is the daily diary of a female teenager between 1937 and 1941.  Her grand-nephew David Griner, a social media strategist and developer, found her diaries and decided to create an daily, auto-posting account of each entry.  When Griner first started the account on January 1, 2009, his great-aunt was still alive (although stricken with dementia).  She passed away about a month later.

As Griner notes, there’s really nothing personal in the diary – it’s more a daily accounting, and most posts focus on the temperature.  But in a time when we’re blasting and being blasted with updates about celebrities and start-ups, gaffes and gore, these mundane, anachronistic tweets offer a real breath of fresh air when they pop onto my screen.  What a different time, when it was sometimes literally too cold for children to go to school because they had to walk so far, or when the highlight of one’s day was having a parent’s friend over for dinner.

There are many exciting potential applications of this idea.  For example, last year on the anniversary of the first moon landing, a site called We Choose The Moon created Twitter accounts for Houston Command, the Apollo 11 spacecraft, and the Eagle lunar module.  The radio transcripts were fed through the accounts in sync with the timing of the events 40 years ago, letting us experience the exciting pace of the event in real-time.  Scattered among other present day updates, it presents a really compelling reminder of how much excitement is happening all around us.

While these novelty accounts don’t justify the existence of Twitter or other real-time social services, they do make for interesting use cases.  They also help keep in perspective the times we live in, and the level to which events in our lives really qualify as “groundbreaking.”