photo credit: freeparking
I was doing research for my dissertation at the National Archives a few months ago when I came across a set of “communications files” for General William Westmoreland, a central military planner during the Vietnam War and later Army Chief of Staff. The files contained all kinds of communications, mostly letters, spanning Westmoreland’s tenure as administrative head of the Army during the final years of U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia.
Unfortunately for my dissertation, I didn’t find anything in the file that directly helped my project. However, one folder in particular caught my attention more for its form than its content. A collection of papers marked “Wire Transcripts, 1968-72″ contained all of Westmoreland’s communications via wire service, or telegram, and when I opened the folder I was immediately struck by the uncanny sense that I was looking at a Twitter feed. The pithy, often awkwardly abbreviated transmissions closely resembled the loose, stream-of-consciousness format that Tweets, status updates, and text messages have made ubiquitous. As I browsed through Westmoreland’s proto-tweets, the effect was like reading an internal history of the Vietnam War broken down to its linguistic essence, and I realized that the impulse to communicate in incredibly short textual bursts was not unique to the Internet Age.
As I approach teaching a history course on Vietnam this summer, I wonder if the tweet-format can have uses in the classroom. Since so many writing exercises attempt to teach students how to organize their thoughts into one powerful central thesis (often in the form of a a single sentence), the informal language of text messaging might provide a natural springboard to develop that process. A good example of how loads of meaning can be packed into 140 characters is found in these “Twitter Discographies,” which break down entire musical careers into nearly mathematical, often brilliant, aesthetic summaries. A personal favorite, Neil Young, looks like this:
Neil Young: 1 shak(e)y; 2+3 yin/yang of entire career; 4 the hit; 5-7, 14 fucked-up genius; 8-13,20-33 yin/yang variations; 15-19 the ditch.
While most students already have a great deal of practice composing text messages, how might they benefit from exploring this format in an academic setting? Are there ways to engage the same critical faculties involved in writing a five-paragraph essay in, let’s say, an exercise that asks students to reduce the Tet Offensive to a series of tweets?
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