Reflections on Narration

Wikipedia tells me that a narrator is responsible for storytelling.  Wikipedia also informs me that as a narrator I can tell the story from my point of view or as if I am a character in the story.  I remember learning about omnipresent narrators in English class in high school and know that plays can have narrators.

But what about when it comes to the online narration of a historical event, in tweets over a one and a half week period?  What are the rules?  How do I narrate, create, respond, and live my own, separate life, at the same time?

My narration experience with this Twitter project is very different from the only other Twitter project like this that I’ve done.  In February 2012 I tweeted, in ‘real-time,’ the fire at the Parliament buildings in Ottawa.  I literally sat at my computer all evening and tweeted at the right time about what was happening in 1916.  Even as I prepare this blog post, well in advance of the day it will be posted online, most of the narration for this coming project is done.

With the advent of social media tools like Twitter complementary tools like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck have been developed to help users of social media tools manage their accounts including the ability to schedule tweets, Facebook posts etc well in advance of the post time.  For this particular project I have used Hootsuite as it is the tool with which I am the most familiar.  There are pros and cons to using such tools, for example, through Hootsuite I am only able to post tweets at times ending in 0 or 5.  Therefore if something happened at 3:44am, as it does in the upcoming days, it is going to be posted at 3:45am. 

Technically readers will not know the difference and the likelihood that readers are awake so late, or early, in anticipation of said post, is so unlikely that by the time they are reading it around 7am or perhaps even later in the day, the ‘approximately 4 hours ago’ timestamp still won’t give me away.

This was a hard decision as a narrator.  My research had yielded several un-Hootsuite-able times including those for which I would probably not even be awake to tweet myself.  I originally turned to Tweetdeck but was overwhelmed by the multitude of tools and decided that it was worth the white lie to use one tool rather than two.  You may be asking, why not choose Tweetdeck?  I had already invested quite a bit of time in crafting my narration and entered these tweets into the Hootsuite publisher so it was an easy decision for me.

I could probably reflect on narration all night long, but as it stands for now, the above reflection is probably the most relevant for this project.  That, and I can only do so much story telling!

Best,

Rebecca