The Library of Congress has acquired every public Twitter post. Every tweet made in the past four years has already been archived by the library and stored in a data center equivalent to a 1,135 foot stack of CD-ROM’s. It makes me think of the giant data library in the Jedi temple on Coruscant. Maybe this is a sign of America slowly moving into the futuristic age, but I don’t quite understand why the Library will keep some of these tweets that have been posted.
One of my very first tweets is:
MusicFANattic: Drinking a new flavor of Venom and running errands with my mom.
Today is relaxing.
11:26 AM Jun 16th, 2009 via txt
Why would some random person go to the Library of Congress to know that? Did he not know Venom came out with a new flavor almost a year ago, or was that person just bored and wanted to know “Hey, lets see what children talk about.” Is the Library going to keep these random tweets that mean absolutely nothing and waste space, or will they leave the pointless ones alone? Say someone goes to the Library to research the history of Sunkist. They find this as part of their results.
MusicFANattic: Sunkist is awesome.
3:02 PM Jun 23rd, 2009 via txtSo in my personal opinion Sunkist is a good drink, but how does that matter? It serves no purpose. Maybe the Library happens to think the end is nigh or nuclear war is on the way so it’s conserving as much as possible for the reconstruction of the world. This one will really be interesting:
MusicFANattic: If something smells bad, put an oreo under your nose. Problem
solved.
4:50 PM Nov 9th, 2009 via txtWhen I see my own tweets, I really begin to question what the Library is up to with the whole archiving process. Why would they even think about archiving something as absurd as this? Is anyone going to search ways to get rid of smells and read “put an Oreo under your nose” to block odors, and then actually do it. Even though random and crazy tweets may or may not be archived, the fact that America is taking tweets and viewing and keeping them is suspicious.
The only tweets that will be archived are public ones. Any direct messages or tweets deemed private will not be archived, according to Twitter. It is also said that the tweets will be for research purposes only, and significant tweets will be highlighted like the first tweet and Obama’s 2008 election winning tweet. But this also sounds like a conspiracy. America is trying to become a more over-protective mother, and to do so it is keeping tabs on the 105million+ users already on Twitter. Next thing you know, the government will be busting through your door every time the word “bomb” shows up on your facebook page. With the 55 million tweets that Twitter is updated with daily, the government now knows what everyone is thinking or doing at almost all times. Supposedly these tweets take six months to be processed into the archive, and allows a lot of time for a tweet to be analyzed by the government.
Google and Microsoft have also said something about making tweets available in online searches, thus allowing internet stalking to be easier. Google then developed Google Replay, a system allowing the searching of historical public tweets pertaining to a specific topic or date. Which for research I agree is a good thing, but for any other purpose is really pointless. How many scientists, historians or professors are actually going to update their twitters with their findings, discoveries or ideas for a new book to rip students off?
My thought: Good idea but also a bad one. The concept of being able to research a tweet is pretty cool. But on the down side, recording tweets is America’s way of trying to monitor its civilians almost as if we’ve lost our accountability, like we can’t be trusted anymore. So if anything like dictatorship or world domination-ish stuff begins to happen, I would rather get in a plane crash, land on an uncharted, magical island and spend three years with John Locke and Ben Linus, then see which one ends in more disaster.
