On Wednesday, the ephemeral, spontaneous tweet died a little bit. The cheerful bluebird twittering away on his branch became a little more self-conscious. And historians — past, present and future — all gave themselves a metaphorical pat on the back.
At 8:36 that morning, the Library of Congress announced (through Twitter, of course) that it would be archiving every tweet since 2006. That’s 6 billion public tweets — 55 million new ones added each day — archived in the largest library in the world. One can only picture the scene 100 years from now: A group of sociologists in tweed jackets will be hovering over a paper-thin iTable under florescent lights in a musty room in the Library of Congress, scrolling through thousands upon thousands of 21st century tweets, analyzing if your tuna fish sandwich in the park has cultural significance.
If you think there is something eerie about the idea of future scholars sifting through your trivial musings on dating, dining and weather, you are not alone. Moments after the announcement, the Twittersphere erupted over the news: “Big Brother is here!” said one tweeter. “The Library of Congress acquiring the archive of our tweets is just another way for the government to see what we are doing,” said another. “I’m only writing this so I can be in the Library of Congress,” tweeted Paula Poundstone.
But others found it incredibly exciting. Diana Vilibert, a freelance writer and self-proclaimed “chronic oversharer” says, “I didn’t feel like my tweets were private in the first place. A lot of Twitter is junk, but it’s nice to think that my children or grandchildren will be able to see what I was tweeting about back when I was 23 years old. It kind of makes me happy.”
In a sense, each 140-character-or-less sentence is now a tiny sliver of history making up an enormous mosaic of human culture that every person, no matter how young, old or wealthy, can help shape. That witty remark you made about the election that was retweeted a few times? It might be read in a digital history book by your great, great grandson, and generations after him. But alternatively, that stinging jab you made at that CEO four years ago could come back to haunt you when you try to get a job.
The Library of Congress was founded in 1800 when Congress gave it $5,000 to purchase a 740-book collection and three maps. By 2009, the Library had a budget of $646.8 million and a staff of 3,624 employees. In addition to the 145 million physical items on some 745 miles of bookshelves, the Library archives other digital collections like snapshots of websites, legal blogs, photographs and more — a total of 167 terabytes of digital information has been collected since 2000 according to Matt Raymond, the Library’s communications director.
Its mission is to “make knowledge and creativity available to the U.S. Congress on a continuing basis … to acquire, organize, preserve, secure and sustain for the present and future use of Congress and the nation a comprehensive record of American history.” Of course it’s hard to imagine members of Congress pouring through books and records when they’re so busy yelling at one another. A spokesperson at the Library-funded National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, said they were looking into working with a group of Stanford University students to organize the data and make it useful. “Obviously part of what we’ll be working on is figuring out how researchers want to use it. We’re assuming that a lot of the research will be on aggregated information, trends and things like that. But to be quite honest, we’re still working that out,” she said.
“I think it’s kind of insane,” says Laurel Touby, founder of mediabistro.com and a frequent tweeter, “Unless they plan to have a search engine built to search the thing, how is anybody going to find anything? It’s a monolithic amount of data. To me it’s just a nightmare of a project. I feel sorry for them.”
The National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program was created in 2000 and from 2008 to 2009 the funds for the program quadrupled, from $1.4 million to $7.5 million. In the 2009 Fiscal Budget Justification, they ask for continued support and funding from the Library, citing that “advances in technology continue to transform the way records of knowledge are created, preserved, disseminated, and shared.” And that they must go beyond traditional methods of preserving information, otherwise there is “a significant risk of loss to the nation’s 21st century cultural records.”
The Library will only archive “public tweets,” which means everything is fair game unless a user has specifically changed the privacy settings to only be seen by his or her followers. Co-founder Biz Stone said on the Twitter blog that only a tiny percentage of accounts are private, but the rest were created “with the intent that they will be publically available.”
On Twitter’s Terms of Service, they write, “By submitting, posting or displaying content … you grant us a worldwide, nonexclusive, royalty-free license to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).”
Most users are aware of the expansive public audience on Twitter, but it will be interesting to see if the Twitter culture is changed by this. “I’m very personal,” says Touby, “but I have a policy that I don’t put anything out in the world unless I expect to see it on the front page of The New York Times. I’m very conscious of there being an audience. I don’t think it’s going to change anybody’s behavior, do you?”
Memorable Tweets:
From the trivial to the historical, here are 10 unforgettable tweets that will now be officially recorded in our nation’s history.
1. THE FIRST CONTACT
March 21st, 2006: Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sends the first Twitter status ever recorded: “just setting up my twttr”
2. THE NEWS-BREAKING
Jan 15th, 2009: New Yorker Jim Hanrahan tweets the US Airways plane landing in the Hudson River: “I just watched a plane crash into the Hudson rive in manhattan”
3. THE HISTORICAL
Jan 22nd, 2010: NASA flight engineer T.J. Creamer tweets from space: “Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station—the 1st live tweet from Space! :) More soon, send your ?s”
4. THE TRAGIC
Jan 13th 2010: Frederic Dupoux reports from the scene in Haiti: “dead bodies are everywhere I haven’t seen one ambulance or any professional med care anywhere in port-au-prince”
5. THE LIFE-SAVING
April 10th, 2008: James Buck in Mahalla, Egypt tweets the one word: “Arrested” and moments later, his 48 followers alert the media and the U.S. Embassy. He was released a few days later.
6. THE EMBARRASSING
August 4th, 2009: Ashton Kutcher posts a Twitpic of Demi Moore in her underwear without her knowing: “shhh don’t tell wifey,” he tweeted.
7. THE POLITICAL
March 17th, 2008: George Stephanopoulos interviews Senator John McCain over Twitter. McCain is forced to keep his answers to 140 characters and people actually pay attention. Thousands tuned in and watched the tweets in real-time.
8. THE JOB SEARCH
May 23rd, 2008: A man in Ireland, Tom Raftery, is offered a job through Twitter, and he accepts with a reply tweet: “Re my new RedMonk position. The formal job offer was made and accepted via Twitter!”
9. THE ROMANTIC
March 20th, 2008: Max Kiesler proposes to his girlfriend, Emily Chang. “To @emilychang – After fifteen years of blissful happiness I would like to ask for your hand in marriage?” She replies: “@maxkiesler – yes, I do!”
10. THE MUNDANE
February 11, 2010: Amanda Bynes tweets: "It's amaziing how good it feels when someone knows how to love your body! I am having withdrawals from a certain guy lol :) So turns out i prefer chocolate over vanilla. interesting,"