Reverend Robert Shields – Would He Have Been the Ultimate Blogger?
Recently, while looking around for subjects to write about on my blog, I came across the story of the Reverend Robert Shields, who died a few months ago.
His claim to fame is that for 25 years he kept a diary – but not any old diary! From 1972 until 1997 he would spend at least four hours a day recording every detail of his life in five-minute segments. Nothing was left out – he even recorded his visits to the toilet (and what he did there) – to ensure that the entire day, every day, was accounted for. In his small office at his his family home in Dayton, Washington State, he kept half a dozen typewriters (Do you remember those?) on his desk just in case any one of them broke down due to over-use. He had them arranged in such a way that he could reach any one of them by using his swivel chair without having to get up.
Each day he would type about 3,000–6,000 words describing in fine detail his daily activities on to single sheets of paper. Eventually, he would bind these sheets into ledgers, which were stored in huge cardboard boxes and stacked to the ceiling just outside his office. As well as detailing his trips to the bathroom, he recorded his body temperature, blood pressure and his daily medication; he described every piece of junk mail he received, every meal he ate and the cost of virtually everything he bought. He even attached a nostril hair to one page so that scientists could study his DNA. He would sleep for just two hours a day so that he could describe the dreams he had experienced. In a good year he would write three million words, but in a bad year he would manage just one million. He would type everything down spontaneously as it came into his head and didn’t correct or edit anything. He said that he didn’t read any of the entries afterwards because if he did he wouldn’t have time to do anything else.
Eventually, in 1997, he succumbed to a massive stroke that curtailed his writing activities although he did attempt for a while to dictate his journal entries to his wife but, perhaps not surprisingly, she quickly became bored with the task. In 1999, he handed over his diary to Washington State University in 91 boxes on condition that it would not be read or subjected to a word count for at least 50 years. However, one sample page has found its way on to the Internet and can be viewed here.
I wonder what Robert Shields would have made of today’s blogging technology. Would he have used it to update his diary for all of us to read and comment on or would he have shied away from it because it was just too public an arena to reveal the details of his private life and personal thoughts? At his age, would he have understood or been afraid of Web 2.0, Windows XP/Vista or Mac OS 10.4/10.5? Or would he have become the world’s ultimate blogger and acquired the same sort of following that ‘Geriatric1927‘ (Peter Oakley) has amassed on YouTube. I suppose now we shall never know!
