A 'Tweet' Deal (Op-Ed)

by Elizabeth Young

“i've been cooking like every night for my friends, as well as myself and i make the BEST (i think lol) Coconut Chicken”

While I’m sure Lindsay Lohan herself thinks this is excellent news, most of the rest of the world would disagree. It’s inane, and the Library of Congress wants to save it forever. The Library of Congress announced on April 14^th that they had acquired every public tweet ever…and they want to save them all forever too. While Library of Congress and Google are excited about the insight this could give historians about the layman’s reaction to such major events as the Haitian Earthquake or the release of the iPad, preserving every little thought anyone ever had is a complete waste of time.

By cataloguing the “tweets” of the world, the Library of Congress is forgetting Twitter’s primary functions. People use the social networking service as a way to send quick messages to friends, despite having other platforms for this, and companies and celebrities use Twitter.com as PR and marketing. Twitter, as a result, largely consists of frivolous and excessive information. While a number of people do use Twitter as their electronic soap box and say excellent, profound, concise statements, finding these statements would be difficult. Not only will we have to see the forest through the trees, we need to identify which trees are worth looking at individually. And I admit I shudder to think of someone looking up the hours when an important Supreme Court decision was made only to find a proliferation of the exact same link with no commentary, or worse over 90% of the tweets being completely vapid and irrelevant. What will “they” think of our society? Or, better question, will cataloguing the tweets give historians an accurate picture of the whole society?

Nope. But they might shed light on a few formative sub-groups such as teens, celebrities, and corporate culture. Not only will identifying influential Twitter situations become difficult, defining relevant sub cultures will also become part of the task. With over 75 million twitter users, though, the demographic would be pretty intensive. These groups I’ve identified as Twitter users are not the usual subjects when it comes to historical studies. Anthropologically, perhaps it’s fair to state that all the digitization we’ve experienced has forced these groups into the spotlight when it comes to recording things “for posterity.” But there’s only so much posterity we can handle.

In this the age of communication where 50 million sentences of 140 characters or less are sent out each day on the Twitter platform, the inane thoughts of people like Tyra Banks, Stephen Colbert, or, God forbid, your next door neighbor just don’t matter. I don’t care if Joe Jonas says goodnight to his fans or that certain campus citizens are currently drunk. Normally the answer for this problem is simple: don’t follow them. But the Library of Congress is legitimizing their thoughts as historically significant, as primary source data for future generations. Every thought.

I’m not anti-Twitter; I actually love it. Do I think that our president’s celebratory election tweet should be saved? Yes. I also love that companies and organizations are soliciting advice and suggestions from their followers. But I use Twitter because I like forewarning for the Hirschorn Museum’s after hours programs and that stores give me online coupons when I follow them and that my cousin’s radio show can remind me when it’s on. I’ll even admit I follow GaryJBusey just because it’s hilarious. This is why Twitter is useful on a day to day basis; it’s very personalized. It’s everything I’ve built up to entertain me, inform me, and aid me. Keyword: me. I, as a unit of historical evidence, am not relevant.

Google says that it wants to focus more on tracing the trending topics than the individual tweets. They want to know things like how many people type “Barack Obama” and whether or not the frequency has a correlation to major events in his career. This is data I can support, because if there’s anything studying history has taught me it’s that there are simply too many people in the world to care about every little anomaly and deviation; Twitter being the perfect example of why the electronic age has the potential to really crowd the vision of scholars.

Take, as an example, an entertainment event such as an awards show because the data supply is rife. Everyone watching sent immediate updates like “OMG Jeff Bridges totes just won best actor”, “Congrats Jeff Bridges, you deserve your oscar”, “haha Jeff Bridges just said groovy in his acceptance speech.” As a historian, the important information to be gleaned, if your research topic should fall in this category, is how many people sent congratulatory tweets vs tweets wishing someone else had won and at what times the frequency was largest, etc. Data. Statistics. Numbers. Sure tweets such as ‘MrZiler’s’ “Jeff Bridges won an oscar for drinking, smoking, and finger banging Maggie Gyllenhaal...My Hero!” will be lost to us and the originality and comedic aspects might even have merit. But think how many useless “yay Jeff Bridges” tweets we don’t need to weed through if we only catalogue that fact that Jeff Bridges was mentioned.

Keeping the archives to every public tweet on Twitter will cut down on much of the personal exchange beyond saved, because people with protected statuses won’t have their data submitted. That’s a plus. Twitter also has multiple systems in place to gauge the success of any tweet: the number of people who “re-tweet” the statement, the number of people who favorite any given status, and the number of people who follow any one user. Perhaps by implementing some sort of numerical determinant the Library of Congress can decide which individual statements are worth keeping? With the addition of selected users being documented fully, such as the White House or the Library itself, a clear and useful picture of our society’s thoughts on relevant issues might emerge.

I’m still trying to imagine situations where an academic would be eager to have this data and I suppose I see the point some have made about understanding what people think is important at any given time, or how people are reacting to a situation. Ethnographers rejoice. But just knowing that I could look up how many people tweeted that their dog was going to the vet that day or the number of people who tweeted just the word “hungry” puts me back at square one. SO IRRELEVANT.