Library of Congress To Archive All Public Tweets 171
After the recent announcement that Groklaw will be archived at the Library of Congress, mjn writes with word that the push to archive more digital content continues: "The US Library of Congress announced a deal with Twitter to archive all public tweets, dating back to Twitter's inception in March 2006. More details at their blog. No word yet on precisely what will be done with the collection, but besides entering your friends' important updates on the quality of breakfast into the permanent archival record, the deal may improve access for researchers wanting to analyze and mine Twitter's giant database."
Re:Your tax dollars at work... (Score:4, Informative)
I's fun to think of historians as just attributing everything they learn about societies to religion and superstition, but the biggest reason we think pre-Enlightenment civilizations were obsessively religious is because the priest castes were generally among the most literate and the most concerned with preserving knowledge of the past. Much of what we know about history comes through their writings—and therefore, their perceptions. They quite literally wrote history, to a large extent, and our understanding of their society is colored by their bias.
The Information Age has democratized knowledge to a huge degree. Historians centuries or millennia hence will have plenty of sources other than the lens of the Catholic Church. Given current trends, even just a decade from now a few consumer-grade storage devices could hold everything the Library of Congress or Archive.org contains today. As long as there are a few people in the world interested in preserving it, modern history should be safe.