The announcement last week that Twitter was providing its complete archives of public tweets (minus the meta data, though, damn) to the Library of Congress sent a shiver through the history geek in me.
On Tuesday Slate did a write up that captured the cause of that shiver nicely:
But the decision to archive Twitter takes digital preservation to a new level of detail. In the past, all archives, even digital ones, had to be selective. The Internet Archive doesn't preserve every last byte of the Webâ€"only the seemingly important parts. The Twitter archive, by contrast, will be mind-numbingly complete. Everything from reactions to the uprising in Iran to Robert Gibbs' first tweet to your roommate's two-sentence analysis of Hot Tub Time Machine will be saved for posterity. Which is, from a historian's perspective, historic. Now that we've started logging all the stray thoughts hurled into cyberspace, the prospect of recording every last word ever publishedâ€"to paraphrase archivist Brewster Kahle, we're "one-upping the Greeks"â€"doesn't seem especially crazy.
Twitter's archives are just one piece of a larger puzzle, and really point the insane amount of detail about the minutia of our daily lives in the early 21st century that electronic communications, and social media in particular, will provide for the future historian. Assuming of course, they are properly archived and the analytic tools of the future can properly read and mine them. The latter we can't know, but the decision by Twitter and the LoC is a huge first step to ensure the former.
Imagine if historians of today had the complete Twitter archives spanning the final few years of the fall of the Western Roman Empire? Or the years of the American Civil War? The more recent we get in time, the more historical records we tend to have, but more often than not those records focus on the major events and characters in time. Historians and archaeologists have to rely on historians of the time, often referring to primary sources that no longer exist, complimented by fragmentary evidence (from pottery shards to personal letters), to piece together what the daily lives, thoughts, passions, and reactions of the general populace was at the time.
Twitter, for all the criticism it takes as a time waster, is a treasure trove of daily insights of huge numbers of people whose names, thoughts, and insights will otherwise never grace the pages of the history books of the future. Again from Slate:
Or take the history of adolescents. The source material for studying how and what kids think has always been limited to school papers, letters from parents and teachers, the occasional diary. Again, mostly "top-down" history. There's little real-world data about how kids interact with each other. Blogs, tweets, and Facebook updates offer glimpses into the lives of children on a scale that no randomized study could re-create.
It's hard to fathom, while we're living in the moment and all just trying to keep pace with the obscene rate of change in tools and norms, what the eventual impact of all this sharing, blogging, and tweeting will be done the road. It's busy reshaping business, politics, and culture right now, but it's also clearly going to fundamentally reshape how the historians and cultures of the future view the online citizens of this era.
So get busy tweeting. It just may be how history remembers you.
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