Big Brother’s Archive Reshapes History

The ever changing technology of today will make the job of future historians seem much more tedious. I believe that in recent years, there’s been a shift in society leading to more and more people becoming comfortable with the internet to such an extent that they share everything they do with the World Wide Web. Future historians will have a better understanding of the sociological patterns of today and will be able to paint a detailed picture of what will become this century’s historic moments thanks to everything we’ve shared on the internet. However, after reading the article “Archiving Tweets”, I’m willing to assume that the Library of Congress’s decision to digitally archive tweets will be a waste of time and hard drive space. The statistics on Twitter.com (last updated on September 14, 2010) state that there are 95 million tweets written per day and 175 million registered Twitter users. While I can see the benefits of archiving every tweet, I think the numbers are ridiculous and this bulk of information will be impossible to sift through without some sort of search bot looking for key words. The article entitled “WikiLeaks and the Historical Community” by K.C. Johnson further drives the point that most of what’s shared on the internet isn’t too worthwhile to historians. Johnson states that “the latest Wikileaks document dump might have produced a boon for informed historical commentary” but “that hasn’t been the case” and K.C. Johnson speculates that this is due to the lack in political and diplomatic history departments nationally and the recent focus on “international history and transnational issues”. Perhaps, the contents of the Wikileaks document leak were not classified enough to make historians jump on the topic but either way, it’s evident future historians will have a plethora of information to sort through which will make their findings more detailed and significantly more time consuming.