Social media and the internet have been said to be as influential as the creation of writing and the printing press when it comes to human communication. With social media becoming a recent phenomenon (almost as old as I am!), it’s interesting to look at prominent historical figures and wonder how they would have used it.

For this assignment, I decided to look at Alan Turing and how he might have used social media. Alan Turing was a mathematician who is famous for making the machine used to solve German coded messages during WWII. I know that in reality, if Alan Turing had social media, he wouldn’t have been able to make some of the posts I made for him due to the secrecy of what he was involved in. His achievements weren’t even known by the general public until very recently. Turing was also well known as being openly gay and was prosecuted by British authorities since, at the time, being gay was punishable by the law. I decided to feature both these events and other major achievements in his life in this assignment.

We were specifically asked to use Fakebook and Twister, both of which are educational tools used to teach about historical figures through their hypothetical use of social media. When creating my “tweet”, I found it odd that there was no option to add a photo for the profile picture. After coming up with the username, and entering in my tweet and the correct date, I saw that the picture is automatically put on. This made me kind of sad since I wanted to have the option of putting another picture on the Tweet, but the image I got was good enough. In Fakebook, you could change the images, which I liked a lot better. There were a few times where, when I typed in the name, the default image for the profile and friends were nowhere near correct.

When trying to attach the assignment to this page, I had some trouble embedding, so I resorted to just taking screenshots and adding links to the photos afterward. I had to take two screenshots of the Fakebook, since the posts didn’t all show up, but it seemed to work out.

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