As much as Twitter has already helped shape our news coverage, it’s still tough to comprehend the fundamental changes real-time media have made to how war correspondents work. Historic accounts like George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia highlight the extreme lengths war correspondents have always had to go to just to embed themselves within the war. But Orwell’s account also shows the difficulties, say, an Englishman covering the Spanish Civil War might have in picking up on all of the background cultural and historical factors that lead to war. With locals on the ground now able to provide direct coverage for foreign readers, we’re able to see how conflicts are shaped through the eyes of the affected citizenry.The widespread use of local, online sources in war reporting lends itself to quite a question: How might Twitter have shaped the coverage of a years-long global conflict like World War II? Alwyn Collinson, a marketing manager in Oxford, has taken it upon himself to try to answer. He’s the man behind @RealTimeWWII, a Twitter account with the absurdly ambitious goal of live-Tweeting the entirety of World War II. How does that work? Collinson started in August of this year, tweeting the beginning of the war as if it were 1939. Over the next six years, he plans to continue live-Tweeting World War II until its conclusion like a long-lost correspondent who somehow jumped forward seventy years in time.I called Collinson in Oxford to chat about what it’s like trying to edit the events of World War II down to 140 characters, why he took on such an incredibly enormous and lengthy project, and how Twitter might have changed the war.First, could you tell me a little bit about your background and why you were first interested in starting this project?Sure, I’m 24 and I recently graduated from the University of Oxford. I did history, and I did not study the Second World War. Basically what pushed me towards this was I was more interested in the application of social media, and I suppose Twitter in general. I don’t have a personal Twitter account, but I was doing stuff with Twitter for my work.And basically I thought Twitter was really interesting. I thought that knowing what people had for breakfast wasn’t tremendously interesting, but I thought that some applications of it were very interesting. For example, when you read tweets from a current news story, especially one where the mainstream media isn’t totally caught up, like the Arab Spring. So much information came [in the Arab Spring] from social media because the news organizations couldn’t get to it.Also, gave it a very sort of personal feeling. It was all about what the eye level view was. It was really engaging because for once it wasn’t sort of measured in calm, neutral tone of newspapers, but it was what people really felt and what they actually experienced, even if it wasn’t necessarily that accurate, or perhaps, you know, not as good of a picture as global media.So I thought you could use Twitter to do something similar for history, in the voice that people in modern media use Twitter. I thought you could share the good voices from history using the same technique, and also engage people. That’s really the strength of Twitter, that real time aspect, the feeling that what you’re reading is happening now. And it can hook you into seeing somebody’s point of view who is perhaps 70+ years dead at this point.You said you didn’t have a specific background in World War II. What sparked you to start treating that conflict as the idea for this project?I just think it’s generally fascinating. I didn’t study it specifically, but I do think of all of recent history (and of course you have to do something fairly recent history so you get that eyewitness perspective) there’s just so much material out there.And when I say material, I don’t just mean books and films and things like that. I mean people’s personal accounts. I think that at this time, our generation is just on this cusp where the Second World War is passing out of living memory and it’s becoming dead memory. It’s becoming a thing of history rather than a thing that people can remember living through. I think that’s tremendously sad.So it’s vital that we remember that this was a conflict people lived through. People who were people. Not just heroes in black and white photographs, but living, breathing people who suffered through and died in [the war]. I hope that my project can sort of capture a little bit of that feeling of what it must have been like on the ground.Do you have any personal connections to the war, aside from obviously being British?(Laughs) Ah yes. Yes I do. My grandfather on my mother’s side fought in the war. He was captured by the Japanese in Singapore, and was rather badly mistreated as all POWs were. But to be honest I never really knew my grandfather very well. I suppose that didn’t really inspire me. If anything, it’s been the other way around. Doing this project has made me go back and read more about my grandfather and be quite astonished by things that I simply didn’t know about him. You know, in his small way he was quite heroic in the prison camp.That, I think, is the story. It’s that we all have a personal connection to the war. Not necessarily in the sense that we all have relatives who fought in it—of course, so many people do—but rather that the Second World War shaped the modern world that we live in.
Let’s see, right now you’re at the point where there are a lot of things going on in Finland, and when I see that Russia is preparing to invade Finland in my Twitter timeline, I have to tell myself that it’s not actually happening. What do you think the advantage is of having this in real time?Well, it’s exactly what you say. I get probably between 20 and 100 people a day saying things like that to me like “Oh my God I forgot where I was for a second and was completely shocked”. And that’s brilliant.I mean, I’m not out to scare people. This isn’t some sort of Orson Wells World War 3 thing. But what if you were living at the time? You would have read about some of these things. You might have read about the invasion of Finland, you too would have experienced shock and that’s a little bit of what I want to capture. It’s not a sort of facile thing that’s trying to help you understand what the peole of the time felt, that wouldn’t work. But I do hope it can give some sort of insight into the War as something where you don’t know what’s going to happen.You don’t know if the good guys are going to win, you don’t know that it’s all going to turn out fine. Rather, it’s an ongoing day to day process of scary events, making your world incomprehensible. And that’s a tiny bit of what I want to try and give, to just remind people that it’s not gone, it’s not dead. It’s not an event you can read about and mythologize and play with. These are actual peoples’ lives and if you look into that you’ll find how fascinating and how complicated it is.Yeah, I would agree with that, that it’s something that is much more powerful to see unfold in real time. But that also has to be something that’s incredibly difficult to do. Do you do it all on your own? I know it’s being translated, right?It’s being translated I think into 8 different languages now. And that’s all done by volunteer translators. Splendid people.It is just me. I do get a little bit of help from people sending me stories and things but the primary research is done my me and the writing is done by me. Really, the research is not difficult. Thanks to there being so many sources it’s actually very easy to find interesting, useful stuff. What’s difficult is to compress that into 140 characters and to make it not impenetrable.If I wanted to, I could be tweeting fifty times a day about the war in Finland and go, “Division X has moved to some city that nobody who is not Finnish would recognize.” That wouldn’t be helpful, because people wouldn’t know what I was talking about. People wouldn’t have any sense of it. It would just be dismissible. But what I want to do is write every tweet so that people might have some idea of what I’m talking about and be interested. That’s the most fundamental thing. The struggle is to make each and every tweet tell a story.
That is a difficult undertaking. Is that something that you have to think a lot about or worry about—how to edit the war?Oh yeah constantly, constantly. I get a lot—well, I say a lot—I get a fair amount of criticism from people, some of it perfectly justified, some of it less so, because people are acting like I’m tweeting a definitive record of the war. I’m not. I can’t possibly express everything that went on or even a representative sample.Rather what I’m trying to do is just keep on flitting around, like one war correspondent. You wouldn’t have just studied a war by reading just one correspondent’s writing. In the same way people shouldn’t take my tweets to be everything happening. Rather I’m jumping around and always focus on something interesting. I’ll do major events to make clear what’s going on, but also then I try to zoom in. Go to an eyewitness. Jump around to something you might not have heard of that happened, something else that’s going on.What would you say are some of your favorite moments? I notice that you have talked a lot about, let’s see, the war’s affect on beer and Scotch production.I think that might be an unconscious bias coming through, to be honest. Certainly I do think that those little things are important. I read a lot of contemporary newspapers. New York Times from 1939 is particularly good. They had correspondents in all the countries fighting because America was neutral in 1939.All these New York Times columns, just like newspapers today, they have trivia at the bottom. It’s half funny stories and half just a tiny little insight into what people were going through. I mean, for the average Briton at the time, it was probably of slight more interest for them to know that they could get their beer for almost half the price it was yesterday, than the fact that Churchill had made a speech.Really, that’s what peoples’ lives are about. They’re about living day to day. Things like the farm ponies running wild in the forest—they were painted in fluorescent stripes so that motorists could see them in the blackouts—people loved that because people loved the image. But at the same time, they’re painted for serious reasons.Little things like that that are a reminder that actual people were living through the war, and they were like you and me. And that’s what I try to achieve. Of course, in exactly the same way, you can jump to some of my tweets about the beginnings of the Holocaust and look at my eyewitness accounts there. You see that, from the point of view of someone on the ground, policy and grand strokes of the pen have very little to do with the day to day situations.
You’re telling news that’s already happened. These accounts are from way before the Twitter era. How do you have to shape that news to fit Twitter?Well, the one thing I’m quite conscious of is not scaring people. I want people to have a moment of shock when they read my tweets, just when they process them. I don’t want them to go off re-tweeting them and starting a scare. For example, for the IRA attacks on London in the Second World War, I actually date my tweets because I don’t want to cause unnecessary panic.With so many stories to tell — and also you have, what, about five years ahead of you now? Six years? — how do you feel about facing such a big project?Terrified, honestly. When I had 300 followers, it was easy. I could have quit anytime I wanted. Obviously, I could quit now, but now it feel more like a challenge. Some people tell me, “You’re not going to make it.” We’ll see about that. I certainly want to get help from other people not just because it’s such a big project but also because I want different perspectives. I’d especially like people that speak other languages that I can’t read, I’d like to get sources from those languages.
But yeah, it doesn’t take up all of my time. I still have a life. I’d say it take about two, three hours a day, and really that’s not that much in the grand scheme of things.No, but it’s still that’s still quite an undertaking. I know it’s early on in this project, but you’re probably already the best person to be able to compare oral reporting from the 1930s and ’40s to how it is now with social media. What would have been different if Twitter had been around in 1940?That’s a good question, and one to which I don’t think there’s an easy answer. It’s a tremendously huge question. Obviously this is only my opinion, but I’m not convinced Twitter would have made as much difference as we might think. For people in 1939, the information was there about things that were going on.Obviously there was some stuff that people chose not to believe, but that happens now as well. The fact that we have Twitter hasn’t made our world a utopia, and I don’t think it would have done the same in the ‘30s. I think that the best you might hope for is that more people might have become aware of various things that were going on, and I’m not only talking here war crimes, but I’m talking about everything.There are so many things across the entire field of the war that could have turned out differently. Perhaps America might have intervened sooner if it had known of some things. Perhaps the war would never have happened if people would have had a better sense that the Germans would actually continue to rampage across Europe.But those are unanswerable questions. I think that you get a better view of the effects off social media by looking at our own modern times and I think that the best you can do in this context is ask instead, “What can we learn about the biases of the people who were writing back then?” I think to do that we just need to take a critical eye to everything. To not just trust what we’re told and look behind the propaganda to see the incentives that people have to lie to us. I think that that’s easier with Twitter than it was in the 1930s, but I don’t think that it’s any less a part of our world.
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