Tweets Going Down In History
DoriE | May 12th, 2010 - 1:16 am
Photo courtesy of digi
Have you ever wanted to live on in history by having something you’ve written added to a place like… the Library of Congress? Well, if you’ve publicly tweeted anything in the last few years, congratulations! You can die happy. The Library of Congress recently acquired an archive of every public tweet broadcast on Twitter. With an average of 50 million tweets posted daily, Twitter will definitely provide historians, anthropologists and the curious with a bounty of information to wade through concerning life in the 2010s.
Martha Anderson, who works for the Library of Congress’ National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, says of this recent acquisition of billions of tweets,
We are in a period of great transition. We’re trying to figure out the best way to leave evidence for future generations of scholarship.
While some scholars don’t see the value in mundane snippets about what you’re watching on TV or where you went for dinner, others view these tweets as deeply personal impressions of real life. This level of detail will be a boon for biographers, authors and others whose work depends on creating accurate, detailed accounts of life during a specific era. You see, scattered among the more mundane posts are the ones whose significance is clear to everyone, such as Barack Obama’s first tweet after winning the Presidential election:
We just made history. … All of this happened because of you. Thanks.
Expanding this thought, there are also the tweets that we don’t even know are significant (yet). Dan Cohen, director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, predicts the future importance of the Twitter archive:
Somewhere in [the digital world], we don’t know where, there is a kindergarten photograph or a link to a personal blog of a future president.
Detractors are saying the tweets are pointless and that the Library of Congress archive will serve as just another version of “Big Brother”. Honestly, though, this news has me thinking more about my messages to posterity than whether the government knows I like cheddar more than American cheese. I’m imagining my daughter searching for my user name within the Twitter archives in 50 years and coming across a tweet from me, dated May 10, 2010, saying, “My daughter just told me she wants to be a pop star when she grows up. Or a doctor if that doesn’t pan out.” This sweet glimpse of her younger self is significant today to my family and, tomorrow, perhaps it will be a footnote in the biography of my famous doctor.
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