When I was a child of the ’70s, my cousins had a rack of encyclopedias that were complemented every 12 months by a gift that kept on giving: The Year in Review.
I poured through those roundup books on nearly every visit, sitting in a corner to read and re-read about how Xenia, Ohio, was devastated by a tornado during the Super Outbreak (1974) or how Muhammad Ali defeated Alfredo Evangelista in 15 rounds (1977) or how wire-walker Karl Wallenda fell to his death in San Juan, Puerto Rico (1978).
The trees that were felled to print such generous books died noble deaths indeed. I can still hear the leather crackle as they opened, so some cows died, too.
And now it is 2014, and I wonder if I will get a similar thrill when I crack open the modern-day equivalent of those printed retrospectives: The Year on Twitter.
Wait, sorry, I did that wrong: It’s called #YearOnTwitter, and it documents all the things that bent our neck downward toward our smartphones and took our attention away from the humans around us.
True, I was doing much the same thing by burying my nose in a book and educating myself on Patty Hearst and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, but it wasn’t like I was also playing Candy Crush.
Anyway, I took the time to scroll through this #YearOnTwitter — which was released this week even though the current year has three weeks to go — to see if 2014 could hold a candle to something like 1976, the year of both the Bicentennial and “Rocky.” The results were mixed:
• World Cup: The biggest sports story of the year, generating 672 million tweets during the month-long tournament and 618,000 per minute during its peak.
Say what you will about the popularity of soccer in the U.S., but that’s an impressive amount of sports fans taking their eyes off the TV to write something clever that would be lost in the shuffle of 618,000 tweets per minute.
• #IndyRef: What’s this? Something about a wildly popular or controversial referee from Indianapolis? No, it was the September referendum on Scottish independence, which generated 3.75 million tweets — or about 100,000 more than the number of actual votes that were cast.
You will mention such things to your grandchildren when you recall the days before elections were conducted via the Internet.
• #MH370: Sounds like the rollout of the latest game-changer in the pharmaceutical world, but this was the missing Malaysia Airlines flight that had entire cable news channels devoted to it for weeks at a time back in the spring. It seems a lot of Twitter followers turned over their lives to it as well.
• #Ebola: Speaking of headlines that took on a life of their own and then made us feel a little silly for going overboard, there was this. The conspiracy theories alone will be remembered for minutes to come.
• #DerekJeter: Apparently, he retired. If only he played in a bigger market so he could have gotten a proper farewell.
• #BerlinWall, #Abdicates: I didn’t know they had Twitter in 1989 and/or 1936. Or maybe I wasn’t paying attention when these were big this year.
And then there was the “most retweeted tweet” of 2014, if not in the long, storied history of the medium — bigger than anything to come out of #Ferguson or the Hong Kong protests:
Ellen DeGeneres’ #Oscars selfie, which technically was taken by Bradley Cooper and featured everyone in Hollywood crammed in and looking spectacular.
Decades from now, we will look back and remember the bright, shining moment when Jennifer Lawrence ruled the world.