Chirpers of the world beware: That tweet last week ““ the one about your drunken liaison with the neighbor’s garden gnome while bound by the grips of Bacchus and Bieber ““ will live on in immortality, well beyond your paltry years. In what appears to be another case of federal fandango, the curators of history at the Library of Congress have moved past the Gettysburgs and I-have-a-dreams and on to more modern concerns ““ every single Twitter update ever.
Who knows what backroom dealings gave birth to this unholy marriage. (I blame the Democrats.) All I can say is that it took less than 140 characters for the Library of Congress’ own Twitter page to announce its plans for social-network overhaul. Their agenda: to immortalize the multitude of every single Twitter post ever alongside cultural gems like Citizen Kane and the Constitution.
Of course, no one (at least among the living) has even read the bill that authorized the Library’s autocratic choke hold on history, and let’s not even speak of the ethics of taxing to archive this brand of balderdash. But there is a bigger picture here, my friends, and a bigger picture all too sinister. Having read my fair share of William F. Buckley, Jr., and being fluent in the language of Rush Limbaugh, I know exactly what the slippery slope to socialism looks like. And it looks familiar.
In sooth, dear reader, your paranoid plebeian regrets to inform you that the Internet is sacred no longer. And our once inviolable right to utter secrecy and exemption from all consequences of our public Web posts is no exception. Oh, license to Internet negligence, how I shall lament thy death!
Did we, the American people, choose to yield our privacy to Uncle Sam? Did we choose to surrender our thoughts to the collective hive mind of Congress? To forfeit our freedom to the Thought Police?
Yes, say the Washington elites with their hidden agendas and political motives. As quoted in the New York Times (themselves co-conspirators, it would seem), Library of Congress Director of Communications Matt Raymond said, “It’s not as if we’re after anything that’s not out there already.”
Clever trickery, Mr. Raymond. Did you truly believe that we, the people of the United States of America, actually read the terms of service that allow “Twitter to make (our) Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with Twitter for the syndication, broadcast, distribution or publication of such Content on other media and services”?
As anyone truly in touch with the people (as the powers that be clearly are not) would know, we cannot be held accountable for what we sign or say. And here I was, under the impression that I could post whatever my heart desired, without fear of future scrutiny by some scrupulous graduate student sifting through the annals of American absurdity.
Why said graduate student would even bother is beyond me. A certain mind once postulated that given a pool of people likely to vote correctly, the greater number of people, the better. The flip side of Condorcet’s jury theorem is that given a pool of people likely to vote incorrectly, the greater number of people, the worse. What applies to elections can apply to information: One ought to be loath to turn to Twitter as a primary source of history.
When Ainsworth Rand Spofford fashioned the Library a veritable ark of culture and history, he did not foresee the rampant inanity we of the tweeting persuasion would master. And if our mindless chirps are good for anything, it’s not their faithful representation of reality; Twitter serves the single useful goal of giving us a platform for our drivel. Journalistic integrity is not on our minds when we fill in “What’s happening?”
But with the Library of Congress adding to its esteemed shelves our every pretense of importance, that drivel ““ hitherto free of real-world consequence ““ has become nothing less than new weaves in the fabric of our national history. And that’s not what I signed up for.
I signed up for a chance to distract myself from class. A chance to stalk people I don’t like. A chance to boast of all my exploits: a miraculous C-, what I had for lunch, how I wound up back at home, intact last Friday morning. I signed up for me ““ not some maudlin attempt at constructing a shared history, of which I want my penchant for nonsense to be no part.
Alas, the asinine chirps of a generation (or two or three) may be in and of themselves the stuff of history. What those scheming bureaucrats in Washington have in store I can only imagine. At least someone’s following me.
Chirp away at Manalastas at jmanalastas@media.ucla.edu.
Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.