Remember that time you sent an SOS text to your friend after waking up alone on an unfamiliar roof, clad only in a neon Speedo that was not yours?
Your friend kindly sent your message to Texts From Last Night, which posted your anonymous yet now infamous plea on its Twitter.
Now, you will be forever immortalized in the Library of Congress.
The Library of Congress recently announced ““ first via its Twitter feed and blog, no less ““ that it will archive all public Tweets that have been published on the service since its inception in March 2006.
“I think Twitter is a pretty big cultural phenomenon, and it kind of catalogs history,” said John Soliman, a second-year physiological sciences student who uses Twitter. “It’s really interesting to keep track of events in real time and what people are saying. I think it kind of reveals what the world was thinking at that moment in history.”
By donating its entire database of public tweets, Twitter will help the Library of Congress preserve the thoughts of millions of users, from seemingly inane thoughts about breakfast to breaking news regarding current events.
While Tim Groeling, a UCLA communication studies professor, expressed his personal dislike of Twitter, he recognized its usefulness.
“It’s been very important for things like the uprising in Iran and in disasters,” Groeling said. “It’s something that a century from now when people want to understand our time, it’s going to be very helpful to have this information available.”
Similarly, Soliman said immediately after the earthquake in Baja California a few weeks ago, he signed on to Twitter to see what people’s reactions were and to keep track of the event in real time.
Since Twitter began in 2006, 55 million tweets have been posted every day, creating a catalog totaling in the billions.
With the database, the Library of Congress aims to create a historical record of the digital environment and a new outlet for research.
This push to capture Web information is not new, as the Library of Congress began collecting website material in 2000, according to a press release. However, the new arrangement with Twitter comes with a few conditions. Tweets can be used for library use, non-commercial research and preservation only after a six-month delay, and Twitter accounts set to private will remain unaffected by this change. However, all public posts are fair game.
The “gold mine” of research possibilities, as Groeling called it, is considered a major benefit, providing insight into the daily lives of countless individuals and maintaining a record for future generations.
Yet with this insight is a mountain of seemingly meaningless tweets that historians will be forced to sift through.
“It seems almost kind of foolish to me that with so many tweets they would try to archive it,” said Alexander Siu, a second-year Design | Media Arts student and Twitter user. “With so many tweets every day, I’m not sure to what extent they’re going to use it for.”
This permanence is an alluring feature to some, since it provides easy access to one’s own posts from the past or those from other users.
Kevin Delavega, a fourth-year computer science student who said he follows a lot of sports journalists on Twitter, was enthusiastic about the possibility of an archive of all of those tweets.
“Although sports journalists primarily write their most interesting articles and stories in their publications, I know that when something really interesting and immediate happens, they want to post on Twitter because it gets their name out, and they do have a lot of followers,” Delavega said.
This transformation of Twitter from a small social phenomenon to a national cultural record demonstrates the continuing change in information flow.
“You should assume in general that anything you put up online will be seen by anyone else,” Groeling said. “My impression is that (this) generation doesn’t care as much about privacy as prior generations. (This generation) is more at ease or OK with consequences of stuff put up online being seen by others.”
Regardless, most students said they were not likely to change their Twitter accounts to private, and were relatively unconcerned about their online posts being collected for research.
So in 140 characters or fewer: Be prepared for your every tweet ““ from spotting rapper Jay-Z at Coachella to posing philosophical musings ““ to become a part of history.