Drips, Thousands of Them

Last month the Library of Congress took the bold and inevitable/ inenviable move of deciding to preserve all of Twitter's feeds since its inception in 2006. This was cause for concern in many cultural circles - the corpus of "tweets" are famously inconsequential, brief (140 characters means they have to be as concise as haiku and they don't even rhyme) and so very much of the moment.

They exist outside any context beyond the immediate, without footnotes or backstory, disconnected to meaningful singular or tracable threads.

Or not. It seems like so much digital noise, either seldom serious or way too personal. I imagine the anxiety in some quarters has to do not with the content as much as the size of this archive. How is this possibly going to illuminate any future historical research?

The problem isn't necessarily in the weight of the corpus - millions of small and disjointed tweets about who and god knows what. They refer to timely and ephemeral cultural events that fade as quickly as they rise in the search-fed trending charts. A cursory look at Twittter's own page of trending topics ("Right Now" vs. "Today" vs. "This Week") reveals the distorted view from the rear view mirror of historical perspective. Objects are closer than they appear.

A bigger question is how are we'll know who wrote these tweets or why. These terse, clever, obscure koans are anonymous to the larger population - the usernames are often pseudonyms, synonyms, acronyms, homonyms. Is that being archived as well, Twitter's proprietary user backend with ISP#s and geo-locations embedded? What if users disabled that feature? Is there a privacy issue at stake? Who is represented geographically and who is anonymous?

And who's tweets will have greater historical weight in the future? Which ones will be more heavily researched simply because they have more surrounding context? Spelled things correctly? Levels of "impact," re-tweet factor, rate of followers, whatever?

Many news stories broke on Twitter in "real time" including the widespread dissemination of Michael Jackson's ride to the hospital in the sky - there are legit reasons to track what's discussed in this skewed and auto-democratic forum. The Iranian election protests in June 2009 on the streets caused 200,000 users to change their avatar green (and some are still are). What does this say about Iran... or about the average Twitter user - that they're politically committed or that they forgot?

It's a new level of discourse, outside journalism and academia. The importance of this LOC archive if it lasts - if it's actually maintained - won't be in what people say in those 140-character text-bubbles but how.

Language when repressed or limited expands in strange and revealing ways. People express themselves differently if they think they're anonymous and if they got no time to finesse. When Twitter goes away, and it will, this collection of immediate inconsequential snapshots, these text notes under the bed, will reveal a time and a place in which, facilitated by mobile devices and the attention spans that all the new toys of our age engender, will show us as a community digitally connected in ways never thought possible, still trying to say something meaningful to the people around us.

History Will Be Written By Nobody

The historical record is the most important object that civilization probably creates. It's not a discreet product or manufactured building or monument that is pre-ordained, pre-determined, or pre-meditated.

It's not a cultural mandate or steered agenda. It's not controlled and it's not finished. The historical record is made up of millions of memos and emails, hundreds of thousands of news stories and video feeds. Documents and bank statements and journal entries and tape recordings. Photographs. Paintings and graffiti and poems and testimony.

Evidence. It's authentic and it's honest and it's made for reasons other than historical reasons, which is why it is so valuable. It's not worried about how it will look 100 years from now; it's worried about now. It all survives as a cumulative and infinite monument to who we were and what we cared about so that the culture of the future will understand how we lived, why we lived, what we were trying to discover about the world and about ourselves.

The most important primary resources of the 19th century frontier life were the hand-written letters that were saved by the pioneers. It was a big deal to get a letter in the old days, and endless minutia were relayed in those pages, which still exist today for historians to discover how things were in the summer of (18)49, how much bread costs, where the roads were being laid down by who's property, who sired what children.

This everyday discourse isn't written down with pen and paper anymore. It's hiding in emails, Facebook news feeds, or Twitter. Its sheer amount - and the perception that it's all so very unimportant noise - precludes anyone from wanting to save it, or being able to, certainly not the people who first created it. Facebook isn't archiving their site... except to mine your data to place ads. While someone' s grandfather may still be printing out all their emails, no one I can imagine is printing out all their friends' status updates.

You won't be able to pull your tweets out of a shoebox under the bed in 100 years like you could a box of letters. The vast amount of social interactions are now taking place between those iPhone IMs and Google docs and whole new generations of us will never commit our diaries, business contracts, family photos, geneology, or bank transactions to anything other than the cloud, up there on someone else's server, where no one's saving it for the sake of its historical value.

Only for its financial exploitation.

We all have stories of that hard drive that crashed last year and lost the pictures of our trip to Disney World or our Aunt Lora, who's dead now and we'll never see what she looked like the last 10 years of her life.

We're likely living in a digital dark ages, right now, and in 100 years we won't be able to know who our friends were, what we said to each other, what roads we travelled next to what properties, how much we made or who sired our children. All, uncommitted to long-term storage and without true historical custodians, will be lost, along, I'm sure, with this post.