Big companies have routinely watched Twitter streams for mentions of their products, good or bad. If they can use that information, no doubt others can too. There’s a lot of stuff on Twitter, some of which has proven to be very important in terms of historical usefulness, like the first tweet ever, Obama tweeting his Presidential victory, and our war with the Moon. Twitter has become a news feed, and like all other sources of information, it should be preserved. That’s why Twitter (and every public Tweet) is being taken into the Library of Congress archives.
That’s right, every tweet is being taken into the LoC archives, from Romeo and Juliet performed via Twitter to the Boston Police’s zombie warning tweet. It’s a reflection of a trend in academica called historicism, in which the historical accounts of events aren’t as important as, say, letters from person to person about the event, diary entries not intended for public publication, and that sort of personal reaction and unfiltered response to events. As such, the LoC is changing its mission a bit. Said Matt Raymond, one of the Library of Congress bloggers, “if you’re looking for a place where important historical and other information in digital form should be preserved for the long haul, we’re it!”
Tags: Twitter, Library of Congress, Library of Congress to archive every public tweet ever, Twitter taken into Library of Congress, historical records, record keeping, historicism, Matt Raymond
