I’ve seen the government do a lot of stupid things; this is way up on the list.
Library of Congress to House Entire Twitter Archive
The U.S. Library of Congress, which archives many forms of media for their cultural and historical significance, has announced it will keep a digital archive of every public tweet that has been broadcast on Twitter since its inception in March 2006.
It’s only appropriate that the initial announcement of this project was given on the Library of Congress’ Twitter account (@librarycongress) and was followed up by a Facebook message before the official press release is issued.
Even though tweets, as messages on Twitter are called, can only be 140 characters long, the amount of information to archive is significant. There are 50 million tweets per day and the total number of tweets already number well into the billions.
Hmmm I don’t remember them asking me if I wanted my tweets archived by them… and what about non-Americans? Is the LOG only archiving Americans’ tweets, or all, everywhere, ever?
The comments on the story were mainly along the same vein:
Oh god, that is a stupid idea. Somehow, endless streams of, “OMG”, “u rock”, and “<3", doesn't really strike me as something worth saving.
Ah, but the LOG has a fix for that. They are going to archive ALL tweets, but only highlight tweets from the *important* people:
Recognizing that the inane tweets will certainly outnumber the significant ones, the Library of Congress plans to highlight the culturally and historically important tweets, such as the first-ever tweet sent by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, President Obama’s tweet announcing his win in the 2008 election and a set of tweets that helped a photojournalist get released from prison in Egypt.
This Twitter archive isn’t evidence of a new focus for the Library of Congress; it has been collecting and archiving websites and online media for a decade now. The Library of Congress currently houses 167 terabytes (or 167,000 gigabytes – the largest iPod storage is only 64 gigabytes) of information pulled from the Internet during that time.
So the Library of Congress has been storing everything, anyway.
April 17, 2010 at 4:20 pm
As much as I dislike government spying, I actually think this is a good idea. Five hundred years from now, when everybody wonders what happened to the great American empire, they need only start reading tweets to find out that we turned into a mindless bunch of idiots.
P.S. I wonder if they’re saving all my blog posts. Will I go down in history as the one who got Waxman to cancel that hearing?
April 17, 2010 at 4:45 pm
Jean– bwahahahaha!!! You know, all I could think of was that old movie–forgot it’s name– about an earth set far unto the future; an animal-like bunch of humans discovered these disks but had no idea what was on them, because people had become such barbarians that they’d forgotten what technology was and how to read and write.
Yes, centuries from now people will see your avatar and marvel that a cartoon character brought down the Powers That Be. yay!
April 18, 2010 at 5:12 am
LOL!!! Or maybe they’ll see my avatar and see proof of evolution!
April 19, 2010 at 10:37 am
Merely foolish . . .
But that only repeats what Jean said.