A note on modern context
I’ve considered removing this project from my portfolio. It ran in 2011, during a moment when social media was widely viewed as a tool for civic empowerment — the era of the Arab Spring, when live, networked storytelling felt full of democratic potential.
Network ’43 posed a speculative question: what if people had Twitter during WWII? It used the medium to bring historical experience closer, not to trivialise it.
Today, the context is starkly different. We witness real conflicts unfold on our screens in devastating detail. The idea of “live-tweeting” war is not a theoretical device; it is, as war always has been, a painful reality.
Some projects belong to the moment that made them possible. This is one of them.
Network '43
Network'43 was a historical Twitter drama that I created to mark Remembrance Day in the UK in 2011. Four Londoners tweeted for three weeks 'live' from 1943.
Our four characters were fictitious but their stories were real and so were the events – constructed from interviews, diaries and Firemens' records. We integrated real photos and film as if posted in real time.
It ended up on the news, the radio, numerous blogs, we received emails from schools around the world who were following the stories in their classrooms and we even got a letter from the Department of Education and included in a whitepaper.