When the Library of Congress announced this month that it had recently acquired Twitter’s entire archive of public tweets, the snarkosphere quickly broke out the popular refrain “Nobody cares that you just watched ‘Lost.’ ” Television tweets are always the shorthand by which naysayers express how idiotic they find Twitter, the microblogging site on which millions of users share their thoughts and activities in 140 characters or fewer.”If tweets are in, how about craigslist.org postings?” one poster wrote on the library’s blog in response to the announcement. Because “all of that information is just as culturally vacant.”The purview of historians has always been the tangible: letters, journals, official documents.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/05/AR2010050505309.html
Twitter archive at Library of Congress could help redefine history’s scope
When the Library of Congress announced this month that it had recently acquired Twitter’s entire archive of public tweets, the snarkosphere quickly broke out the popular refrain “Nobody cares that you just watched ‘Lost.’ ” Television tweets are always the shorthand by which naysayers express how idiotic they find Twitter, the microblogging site on which millions of users share their thoughts and activities in 140 characters or fewer.