How Tweet It Ain't

I am late to the game, but sometimes it takes a while for things to percolate in my head.

The Library of Congress recently acquired the “entire Twitter archive.” Which first makes me think the word “archive,” like the words “awesome” and “hysterical,” has outlived its usefulness. What, really, will be the use to the future of the “entire Twitter archive”? I doubt many will want to read or study its overt content. Snippets of communication only 140 characters long, broadcast over the internet and about as ephemeral as the voice-clearing of a television newsreader, are not likely to take on historical significance in their own right. Instead, if not for its digital form (and even there I have a caveat), I suspect the “entire Twitter archive” should look forward to a status like that of old buttons in a canning jar. But in digital form, at least so long as a cadre of information technology priests succeeds in a continuous serious of lossless data migrations (my caveat), the “entire Twitter archive” may be a goldmine for social scientists and historians with a knack for constructing search terms that yield interesting results. So I roll my eyes when the Library of Congress Blog proclaims:

Have you ever sent out a “tweet” on the popular Twitter social media service?  Congratulations: Your 140 characters or less will now be housed in the Library of Congress.

Yes, thank you for turning my well-honed, 140-character tweets into a cloud of data points. But no, human eyes are not likely ever to read them again as the messages they are, the way people still read the novels of Henry James or the plays of William Shakespeare or the dialogues of Plato. Twitter, and especially the concept of the “entire Twitter archive,” destroys the human authorship of tweets. With only 140 characters, no one cares long, if at all, about what the tweeter meant to tweet. And we reduce the “entire Twitter archive” to birdsong, or buttons in a jar: a form that can be enjoyed while safely discarding its function, left to the analysis of statisticians. That is not a job for librarians, who should be doing the opposite by preserving the messages of the past within some construction of contextual continuity, instead of simply aggregating their components into databases.

Which is not to say there’s no place for a database like the “entire Twitter archive.” But in the Library of Congress?