The Tweet smell of history
Imagine your tweets about what you had for lunch and your riffs on American Idol being preserved in the same hallowed halls as the Declaration of Independence.
One of Twitter's founders disclosed yesterday on the company blog that the Library of Congress (picture above) was interested in preserving the entire digital archive of public tweets made on the micro-blogging service. Founder Biz Stone said 55 million Tweets are created daily and the number is rising.
So what do you think? Is saving public tweets a historical imperative -- or is this a waste of time/money on the part of the world's biggest library?
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Comments
Is this another Government mandate or some more big brother.
Posted by: GEORGE | April 15, 2010 8:12 PM
Maybe it is not a historical imperative, but like they say: One man's junk is another man's treasure. And maybe one day, our tweets about what we had for lunch would help a 24th century anthropology student or someone else. Libraries are there to preserve the present for the benefit of future generations.
Posted by: Goranka | April 16, 2010 5:25 AM
I agree with Goranka. From a historian's perspective, I think it makes sense. In a couple hundred years, people will be able to use those tweets to figure out what people actually talked about, how we felt about big events, and how we interacted with each other, the way that historians use letters and diaries now. But we don't keep letters or diaries anymore and people would flip if anyone tried to archive our emails. Hell that tweet about lunch will tell someone what people actually ate. What did an Egyptian eat? Any Ideas?
Good point. Funny how it takes the passage of time to make the everyday, mundane details of our lives seem more interesting from a historical perspective. -GS
Posted by: Gina | April 16, 2010 7:54 AM