Years Ahead of Time

John Qunicy Adams, the sixth President of the United States (and the first son to succeed his father -- albeit by a few years -- to the presidency) apparently was a cutting edge figure. Recently a group of high school students visiting the Adams Family museum in Massachusetts made the observation that the diary/journal entries that Adams made in his daily diaries were the same, bite-sized bits that are seen in tweets sent by Twitter in today's world. Immediately the Massachusetts Historical Society decided to jump on the bandwagon of Twittering and has announced that they will begin tweeting Adams's original diary entries verbatim to commemorate his trip to Russia when he was foreign envoy to the nation.

Now again I've mentioned before that I don't really get the appeal of tweeting on Twitter. I don't understand how important it is for people to know what you may be doing every moment of the day. I can understand if you read a fairly interesting life or you are experiencing something out of the ordinary but most Twitter tweets I've heard of deal with mundane things about how boring class is or how someone is looking forward to partying this weekend. If that's the extent of the tweet then what's the point? Why do we need to know but more importantly, why do we care? Not that Adams didn't lead an interesting life. As those who may have seen the recent HBO series (or read David McCollough's original book) on Adams's father John Adams would know that even from childhood he led an interesting life by accompanying his father on trips around the world and the like.

But still, it's not like every day on his journey was wrought with adventure and excitement. After all, if life was that exciting every moment of every day then I think we'd all explode from an overload of adrenalin or something. Still, I think it's fascinating that people are able to find ways of linking people from the past to the present using modern technology. Now if someone were very naive I'm sure they'd come up with a theory that Adams knew short, concise communications would be the key to future communications technology like Twitter or cell phone texts then I'm sure they would also believe that the state of Hawaii has faked Barack Obama's birth certificate in hope of creating a global conspiracy that was meant to take down our country forty-plus years later.

Conspiracy theories and ridiculous concepts aside, I think this is at least one way to entice kids to take a more active interest in learning about the history of their nation. I'm sure many people will follow along on the tweets being sent in Adams's name but I also hope that it spurns them on to learn more about him. For me, if a period or story in history fascinates me, I try to learn as much as I can about it. The world can be a fascinating place and history is an important part of it. Maybe my reluctance to understand or follow people along on Twitter may be changed by this new concept but it remains to be seen.