Sir Ernest Shackleton and Twitter
Many of you will have already deduced that my dwindling post rate on this blog can be attributed, in the large part, to Twitter, the fast-creepng ivy that is wrapping itself around the seasoned bark of so many online diaries.
It's a wonderful medium in a heap of ways, but I occasionally wonder if it isn't all just utterly inane, and I was gobsmacked to read (in David Crane's brilliant biography of Captain Scott, Scott of the Antarctic) that Shackleton thought the same about his first Antarctic diary, 107 years ago:
I turned in about 1am. What a ridiculous thing it must seem to other people to read a diary where such a statement as 'I turned in at 1am' appears as if they were interested in the time another fellow mortal at the other end of the world went to bed… Those sort of items are the penalties that one's friends must pay when struggling to gain a little real information in these reams of paper.
- E.H. Shackleton, diary, 14 July 1902
— Filed under Miscellany