Mark Twain, please meet the Internet. Mark Twain, Internet; Internet, Mark Twain.
I wonder a lot about what our lost literary greats would do if ever confronted by this fine web of technology. The people who dedicated their lives to the laborious process writing, to rewriting, to editing, to the kind of precision that sometimes seems like it’s missing today—how would they survive in a state of constant digital flux, a barrage of chatter in 140 characters? The thousands of letters that Mark Twain wrote might have been very different if they hadn’t had to cross oceans and mountains and the Mississippi River before anyone ever read them.
But here we are—two twenty somethings and a septuagenarian professor—traveling with Twain in a digital age. We want to attempt to pick up where he left off and chronicle American life, just with shinier, faster tools and a dependence on batteries and wi-fi. (Let’s face it, there’s no room for a typewriter in our van.) Using our new website, we’re going to do our best to give you timely updates on the people we meet and the progress we make around the country, and we invite you to participate.
You can interact with us a few different ways:
E-mail us at twaintrip@gmail.com
Facebook us here
Tweet at us at @twaintrip and use the #twaintrip hashtag
Mark Twain would have had a strong opinion about the Internet, no doubt. Whether he would have confined that opinion to 140 characters, who can say? But in any case, he’d want to share, and we want to share too.
Alyssa
