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.Read the rest at Motherboard.
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