John Quincy Adams Didn't Tweet

The Massachusetts Historical Society is publishing the one-liner diary entries that President John Qunicy Adams made in late August, 1809; his posts were all 140 characters or less, so it’s doing it via Twitter. You can read them as if he’s tweeting each day, 200 years later.

He has 4,200+ followers, so a few social media advocates have said this proves there’s value in micro-blog (short) posts.  While the technology of Twitter may be new, the desire and utility behind the behavior is hundreds of years old.  If Adams could tweet without a mobile phone app, shouldn’t we all consider it almost an obligation to do so now?

Er, no. But the real history behind it is pretty interesting:

• Diaries humanize experience.  Adams described August 6, 1809 like this: "Thick fog.  Scanty Wind -- On George's Bank.  Lat: 42-34.  Read Massillon's Careme Sermons 2 & 3.  Ladies &c. Sick."  How cool is that?  It's like you're there, standing in a long ago moment that otherwise evaporated the moment after it was immortalized.
• The brevity of the entries isn’t a plus.  Adams kept other, more detailed diaries, so it seems that his log was more of a table of contents, or memory prompt.  For all that I think I get from reading it, the entries were cues to lots more that only Adams could recall.
• At the time, nobody would have cared anyway.  Back in the dark days of Analog Existence, knowing what other were doing or thinking was based on infrequent input, and lots of assumption.  Adams' fellows wouldn't have felt the need for the incessant quanta and abbreviated detail of tweets.
• Everybody kept lists...for themselves.  Thomas Jefferson recorded every bottle of wine he drank for a quarter century (and how much he paid for each).  Emily Dickinson wrote poems for herself.  The centuries-old tradition isn't to share this information, but rather to record it for one's own consumption.

Interestingly, Adams must have felt that he could capture what was important to memorialize in a single entry each day.  So he wasn't a proto-tweeter; he was anything but.

There's nothing ambient, or constant, or social about keeping a diary.  Tweets are disposable, life histories are not. We are frail, impermanent human beings, and we have a natural desire to want to capture some small part of our brief time on this planet.  That's what Adams did.

It's not different from what you or I could do.  Typed.  In pen and ink, or even using a crayon.  Capturing tidbits of existence that will help give shape and form to your memories down the road.  Noting things that matter, presuming the only person who will ever want to read them again will be you.

The Bulb Asks:

• Are you sure you're analyzing data objectively?
• For every obvious behavior, there's probably an underlying one that's more true.
• I should be capturing these posts somewhere more permanent than here, right?

Comments

[Jonathan]

Jim, I'm with you, though we perhaps have different perceptions (or criteria for) "value." A tweet that can be ignored, erased, and costs nothing to read isn't terribly valuable, unless you're equating the concept with words like 'tolerate' or 'whatever.' And then when you apply it to the Historical Society, I think you confuse your definitions again: a purposeless tweet doesn't make the historical documents less valuable (or the importance of history to our lives generally). I doubt people in 1809 would have thought there was anything terribly important or magical about getting daily updates from one another.

I just think that it's funny that we do.

[Jim Cosco]

Good insight Jonathan. Thanks for linking out to us too.

I think I was trying to say in my blog post that this was a good use of the platform itself and that the Mass Historical Society was brilliant to realize they could use Twitter to get their content out to a much larger audience.

I think the value of his Tweets is not for me or you to judge though. If they are not valuable then the majority of his 14,339 followers will decide to unfollow him in short order. I for one look forward to seeing them delivered to my phone each day. They beat 99% of the junk out there. But we'll know the real value in a couple months when we check to see if his followers are dropping him.

You're right though, if these messages were going out back in 1809, people might have thought they were pretty mundane; but the historical context is great from today's perspective. If there was really no value, the Historical Society should shut its doors, or at least stop displaying that particular journal.