RealTimeWWII - Twitter's first great piece of art.

A while back, when Twitter was but a mysterious platform for posting about life's inanities to a handful of uninterested people, a writer tried to tell a story in posts of 140 characters of less. It was some boring woman, I think she wrote The Exmoor Files, and she then went on to predict that there would one day be a 'Twitter Masterpiece'. I called cried foul immediately: what a poorly thought through way of writing a story. It just smacks of pretentiousness and novelty. And at the moment I'm still right; the best we've got are some of the intelligent fake accounts that parody people, living or dead.

However, I wasn't banking on something like @RealTimeWWII coming along. It's not fiction but it is art, even if that isn't what it set out to do. RealTimeWWII sends tweets as if World War Two is currently on-going. Sample tweet: 

SS have arrested over 1,200 students. All Prague universities permanently closed. 9 "ringleaders", chosen at random, have been shot"

The amount of research that must have gone into the making of this is daunting. Famous events are covered, of course, but it's the minutiae of the war that really put things in perspective. It allows us to compare the many atrocities committed during the war with the daily workings of the 21st Century. Somehow 'Northen Rock Sold To Virgin' (today's headline) has less impact when it's sat under 'Prague: Trucks of SS troops just drove into Karlsplatz; protest broken up with rifle-butt beatings. Germans have arrested dozens of Czechs' in my twitterfeed.  (Can we rename the Twitterfeed the BirdFeed?)


"One person killed is a tragedy, a million killed is a statistic", and we all know the statistics: 25 million soldiers killed, the same number again of civilians killed. It's impossible to really grasp what those numbers mean, and this is the genius of  RealTimeWWII. Currently (minus 72 years!) in WWII, full scale European warfare is still a few months away, so it will be fascinating how it changes once the belligerents fully engage, but this early period is sort of terrifying; I felt a pang of, what, fear or apprehension when I read the tweet 'Berlin has rejected Dutch-Belgian offer to mediate with Allies & threatened to "show the British what it means to be at war with Germany"'. 


RealTimeWWII makes use of the Twitter medium perfectly. The key elements of Twitter are the 140 character rule, the 'timeline' nature of the Twitterfeed, and multimedia opportunities. All of these are harnessed to great effect. The necessity of brevity in composing each post means there is room only for the brutal facts:  '9 "ringleaders", chosen at random, have been shot' is so brutally factual that we instinctively fill in the gaps and re-imagine the scenario; not so hard given that I myself am a student. The day-by-day nature of RealTime WWII means that it is not a 'greatest hits' - as it were - of the events of WWII. To keep it moving the writer has to include some slightly more mundane aspects of life at the time - we get quotes from forgotten politicians, anonymous members of the public and trivialities of life as well as important military events such as the Winter War. One particularly brilliant aspect of RealTimeWWII is that it posts news items and photos from the time. The immediacy these pictures give is striking. No longer just a photo in a textbook, it is instead contextualised beautifully, one detail in a vast canvass. 


What makes this art is that it allows us to re-imagine a period in history that we though we knew so well, and contrasts it with the frankly comfortable society of today, recession and all. It is outstanding.