Today the Guardian newspaper got wind of the news that the Library of Congress is going to be archiving all public tweets on the site. This is no small feat as since Jack Dorsey the creator of Twitter posted the first ever tweet way back in March 2006, Twitter has processed quite literally billions of tweets. Furthermore, the numbers are climbing sharply with a current estimate of over 50 million tweets a day. What seems somewhat confusing is the reason why they want to archive twitter in the first place.
This is not in any way intended to undermine the move as it’s clearly quite a drastic undertaking. Notably, the announcement was made on the Library of Congress’ own twitter feed. What confuses me is how valuable the content is going to be in the distant future. I can see the point archiving great works of literature like the Magna Carta or Homers Odyssey, but frankly I can’t see anyone being interested in how joeboy “Is living it large on Saturday” or ShellyB was “Absolutely wasted all last week”.
Of course it would be a bit closed minded if I left it at that as there is an element of twitter that the Library of Congress has picked up on as having some value to posterity. As a social networking site used by over 100 million people it creates an insight into a cross section of society at major events in recent years. It shows the support and public perception at the Obama inauguration, the reaction and shock to the Haiti earthquake and the wave of support immediately after. When considered as a history of social views and perceptions in recent years you can see why Congress has chosen to archive it after all.
In the next move for the library of Congress I hear they were going to start indexing Poke-mon cards but can’t seem to get hold of a Pikachu.
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