Wednesday, February 25, 2009

@Granumentally

Christian Payne is a young man who doesn't live very far from me, although we've never met. He Twitters under the name Documentally. According to this site, he's the most followed Twitterer in our county. I am one of his many followers.

Christian contributes a vast amount of material to the aggregation of personal perspectives that constitute the cloud, but one of the things I admire most about him is the enormous love he has for his grandmother, something which comes out loud and clear in his tweets.

During the Obama inauguration, he and his gran were watching together and he was twittering some of her remarks. Many of his followers expressed the view that she should have her own account. Trouble is, she doesn't use a computer herself. So she and Christian hit upon a plan. He would be her fingers during his frequent visits to her. And Granumentally was born.

In the process of acting as her amanuensis, Christian learned all sorts of amazing things about his gran, such as the fact that she was a partisan who smuggled messages under the seat her bicycle right under the noses of the German soldiers. Hear their touching story as part of this podcast from CBC radio (Canada)'s Nora Young.

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