Tweets For The Future

At some stage in our lives most of us would have thought about creating a time capsule. There is something quite exciting about gathering your treasures, writing a note and digging a hole; hoping that someday a future three eyed, green fleshed alien will discover your most loved items. However, gone are the days of letter writing, diary keeping and more importantly, digging for treasures.

The US Library of Congress has approached the notion of a time capsule from a modern day point of view, embracing that most of how we think and feel is now communicated via social media. The institution is gathering all of the 400 million tweets posted by their fellow Americans each day, in the belief that each message reflects an important part of the national narrative. Gayle Osterberg, Director of Communications at the Library says, "An element of our mission at the Library of Congress is to collect the story of America, and to acquire collections that will have research value”.

Although there are many obvious disadvantages, the (questionable) invasion of privacy and lack of opt-out facility; there is also a multitude of reasons as to how America in particular can benefit from this. As we use books, artefacts and photographs to recall important historic events, there will now be access to a vast bank of insightful comments (although we bet a huge proportion of tweets collected will be completely random). Additionally, the tweets can be used to build up a fairly accurate cultural model of what society was like in the 21^st Century, but of course for some this may not be a good thing...