I’m Actually Quite Flattered the Library of Congress is Collecting My Tweets

Here's Lookin @ You Kid

Well, I’m rather important aren’t I? Me and my musings of men as pistachios, Lindsay Lohan and her feud with (insert appropriate punch line here), the guy who tweets for @jesus, we’re all gonna be stored in some server alongside the Federalist Papers, and it’s gonna mean something.

Why you ask? Well perhaps it’s time to take a step out of your bubble and put things in perspective. How history and sociality as we know have been unquestionably altered by the Internet and all the technologies that have accompanied it.  Embrace this democratization of history fueled in large part by the Internet and further enfranchised by a magical little thing called a weblog.  Thank you weblog, oh have you adapted and grown with time.  You little digital chameleon you.

So it is the micro-blog, the anorexic sonnet, the 140 keystrokes of madness, which has captured the attention of the Library of Congress (they’re not archiving public Facebook pages now are they?).  And some decry privacy, but really bud, what are you doing publicly tweeting your hygiene habits if you didn’t want the Library of Congress digesting them?  You obviously didn’t take this whole “world wide web” nonsense seriously.

This announcement is part of a larger web capture project snapshotting the read-write web during soon-to-be historical events, it’s like real-time history and I dig it man, I mean I totally excavate it.  It helps provide contextual focus to my digitally desensitized life.   Turns out, this whole Internet, social networking site, iPhone revolution thing might really actually have a place in history (insert appropriate technological tool for holding words here) some day.  And while tweeting whatever it is you tweet about, chuckling at @shitmydadsays, and shoving a thought into 140 characters might seem pedestrian to some, the historical record has decided otherwise.

My one reservation however, is the validation this will give all the self-absorbed SNS-ers I so often lampoon.  Do we really need to further fuel the swellheadedness that so many turn to Twitter and Facebook to grandstand? Perhaps it will just give future history readers a whole lot more to read about, infinitesimal tweetings on the cave wall.