CorpComms Magazine

Messages posted on Twitter bear a striking resemblance to entries in 18th and 19th century diaries, says Lee Humphreys, assistant professor in communications at Cornell University in New York.

Diarists of the period would have had no trouble sticking to the 140-character-limit, tending to be 'matter-of-fact', repetitive and pretty perfunctory in their chronicling of 'mundane' events.

Humphreys cites one particularly scintillating extract from the fabric-spinning diary of Elizabeth Fuller for 1792. 'Sept 6 - I spun three Skeins. Sept 7 - Fidelia Mirick here a visiting to-day. Sept 8 - I spun three skeins to-day. Sept 9 - I spun three Skeins. Pa & Ma went to Mr. Richardson's a visiting. Sept 10 - I spun three skeins.'

Even significant and emotional events, such as births, marriages and deaths tended to be baldly reported. One 1770 entry in Mary Vial Holyoke's diary read simply, 'Mr. Fiske Buried.'

This seeming curtness may have been partly because chroniclers treated diaries as a form of public record and expected them to be shared, rather like a microblog, though particularly with close kin. Humphreys noted: 'It was not until the end of the 19th century that diaries became much more introspective and confessional in nature.'

Whilst the sharing feature may be common to both media, Humphreys does not shy away from the differences both in size of audience and also the new element of interaction and reinforcement that comes from the presence of online 'followers'. She points out that, 'Social interactivity is seen in Twitter's conversational nature and...the breadth and rate [sic] of which microblogs can be shared also does not have historical parallels.'

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