200-year-old ‘tweets’ found in diaries

Here's an interesting post from Futurity.org:

200-year-old ‘tweets’ found in diaries
CORNELL (US)— In reviewing volumes of diary entries—mostly written by women—from the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a researcher at Cornell University has found many terse Twitter-style records about what was happening in daily life.

Entries ranged, for example, from what was for dinner to reports of deaths, births, marriages, and travel—such as “April 7. Mr. Fiske Buried. April 27. Made Mead. At the assembly,” from the 1770 diary of Mary Vial Holyoke of Salem, Mass.

“We tend to think of new media as entirely new and different,” says Lee Humphreys, Cornell University assistant professor of communication, who has studied social media for five years. “But often we see people using new media for old problems that people have always had to think about and engage with.”

Read the entire article on Futurity