John Quincy Adams joins fleet of unlikely Twitterers
John Quincy Adams has begun posting to his Twitter account. The chronologically challenged posts are among several examples of entertaining or informative accounts supposedly belonging to historical or fictional characters.
The Adams account (@jqadams_mhs) is the work of the Massachusetts Historical Society and is designed to promote a Web site containing 14,000 pages of his diaries. The account uses genuine extracts from his diaries with Adams’ concise style fitting into the Twitter format easily. The account launched this week and is exactly 200 years behind reality, kicking off with Adams’ first trip to Russia.
It’s another example of creative posters using either fictional characters or historical figures to use Twitter in an informative or entertaining way. Here are some others worth checking out:
@peggyolsen. Posted by Man Men actress Carri Bugbee, this in-character account won an award earlier this year for the best use of Twitter for advertising.
@peep_show. This is actually a collection of eight characters (check out the “following” list on the account) from the British sitcom. Billed as “an experiment in interactive comedy and fiction”, it’s used as a way of promoting the show while it’s off-air. The effects are particularly surreal when the characters begin posting their real-time thoughts about other TV shows.
@drsamueljohnson. Unlike other historical figures, the diarist and dictionary compiler posts in the modern day. Hence: “The Gentleman has no need of Mister NINTENDO’S Wii. Why enact a game of Lawn-Tennis in the Drawing Room?” and “Mister JOBS is opening his Apple Store in Brighton, which shall rival the PAVILION as a white Castle of PRETENTIOUSNESS”
@LCROSS_NASA and @LRO_NASA. Though not technically fictional, there is certainly something unusual about two NASA Mars landers writing on Twitter in the first person. The two landers even have distinct writing voices, with LCROSS once noting “I am staring at Mendeleev (Lat 5.7N,Lon 140.9E), a large ancient impact basin with uniform floor deposits” while LCO writes “The moon has capture me! I am there!”
@historicaltweet This account doesn’t post messages, but rather links to new posts on a blog which produces one-off Tweets for a variety of historical figures. They range from the creative (HonestAbe asks, on 18 November 1863, “anyone got a more creative way of saying ‘87 years?’”) to the tasteless (M0llyBr0wn, posting on 14 April 1912, asks “my drink’s STILL warm. what’s a girl gotta do to get some ice around here?”)
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