Back in April the Library of Congress announced that they acquired every tweet ever made, thanks to a gift from Twitter, Inc. And they will continue to acquire tweets as they are made! I apologize if I'm behind the times, I've just seen this headline now. But how cool is that?! I tell the kids on my tours a lot that historians 150 years from now will have a hard time researching our generation because everything is texting, IMing, Facebook message, wall posts, tweets and emails, and those things seemingly are lost when they are deleted. Over the years the art of the letter and the love letter, the diary and journal, writing in longhand - they've disappeared. When was the last time you wrote a letter to someone? Not a birthday card or a thank you card, but an actual letter. Got out a piece of lined paper and a pencil and wrote a letter to someone telling them how you're doing and asking them the same? I haven't done this in... years. So 150 years from now, what will historians have to say about me? All of my texts and emails... they'll be gone.
So it's nice to know that my tweets will last. Although, what will our tweets say about our generation? Justin Bieber was a trending topic for how many weeks... 15? Let it be known for the record that I had no part in that!
What do you think about having your tweets housed forever in the Library of Congress? There is a group out there who disagrees with it, so they've created hashtag #noLOC, so if you use that in your tweet, the tweet will be automatically deleted after 23 weeks and your tweet will not end up in the LoC.
We can't all be Mark Twain's and go down in history for our humor. We may as well go down in history for our excessive and twasome tweeting!
*Caitlin
"The minor events of history are valuable, although not always showy and picturesque." -Mark Twain
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