It is no secret that I love Twitter. I’m connected to it with my phone, and my laptop is never off, so if you consider that I sleep about nine hours a night, that is fifteen hours a day where I am constantly mashing on keys and interacting with people on the Internet. Ordinarily I wouldn’t give this a second thought, but with the announcement that the Library of Congress has begun to archive tweets, I have started putting serious consideration into whether or not this plan actually offers any value to the future.
According to Matt Raymond, the “Tweeter-in-Chief” of the Library of Congress, over 55 million tweets a day, billions over months, are being digitally archived. This translates into roughly 1,135 feet of stacked CD-ROMs.
For a sense of perspective, we’ll break down some numbers of both me and a few friends who use the service and are fairly active users of Twitter. I created my account in April of 2008 and since then have produced over 13,000 tweets or roughly 18 tweets a day. Compare that to Chris, a friend who lives in Texas and lives on his cell phone, registered his account in July of 2008 and currently has 27,000 tweets, an average of 37 tweets a day. On the other hand, my pal Tyler has had his account for about a year now and only has constructed 2,100 tweets, five a day. At our most active, it could be said we are still barely contributing to the daily record.
So with such a high amount of data being produced globally by users, what is the point of archiving at it all? There may not be an immediate answer, but each day, studies are being produced that highlight the long term pros of preserving this social record.
The primary benefit appears to be in the balanced population of its users. According to a study produced by Ryan Kelly of Pear Analytics, Twitter’s users are roughly 55% women, 45% between the ages of 18 and 34; is used by 60% of a population that possesses either a college or post-college degree and involves 34% more African American users than the Internet average. Putting it simply, Twitter users are prime targets for contributions to historical commentary. Educated, socially interested, and loquacious enough to maximize 140 characters, giving each message more weight, as it has been distilled down to its purest form while being able to convey the point.
A secondary benefit is how quickly Twitter is becoming associated with commentary on current events. Beginning its rise to prominence during the Obama campaign, the online service was a constantly utilized tool by grassroots Democratic movements to promote rallies, spark debate and most importantly, motivate people to vote, especially on college campuses. In fact, something I had forgotten until I was looking at Andrew Hampp's Inauguration Coverage, but for Obama’s history making inauguration, Twitter received five-times its normal traffic, and users were suffering from over capacity errors and extended delays in updates.
Twitter was also incredibly involved with the scandal involving the Iranian election in June of 2009. Amidst controversy that incumbent President Ahmadinejad had falsified ballots to win the election with 62% of the vote. In the days that followed, a number of raids were performed on various public media facilities, including those run by the BBC and NBC news. Facebook was also targeted for filtration and with that, people turned to Twitter to get the word out and like the Obama campaign, Twitter responded. While I was unable to locate the statistics, I can recall from memory the countless tweets and re-tweets (copying and pasting someone else’s tweet so your friends can see it) urging people to shade their avatars green, change their default locations to Tehran and tweeting between specific hours to help throw off filters. The staff of Twitter even went as far as re-scheduling maintenance to times that would have a lesser effect on the organizations of protest rallies and liberal outcries.
Most recently, Twitter has been in the press for being under fire by Oil Company BP, during this most recent spill for allowing a spoof BP public relations account to exist. Although the account “claims” to be the official PR account for the company, reading one or two of the tweets makes it clear that it is not the case. The account is followed by over 100,000 people and has also raised more than $10,000 for relief causes, and continues to generate attention and discussion with its humorous takes and creative jabs at the continuing crisis.
However, these events are probably more exception than rule. If we refer back to the statistics generated by Kelly, 40% of tweets are labeled as “Pointless Babble,” meaning they hold no substantial value and with “Conversational” tweets making up 37% of tweets, there is a lot of fat to trim just to get some meat. I certainly can recall chiming in my own two cents during the Obama inauguration, but it would be kidding myself to think that in the end it had any actual meaning or historical relevance
In the end, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle as Twitter is still a fairly young service only beginning to truly reach its potential. Given that the amount of space it takes to archive each day’s total seems inconsequential to the bigger picture of the world’s stored information, the problem remains in gauging its true worth as it relies on three big questions: What is its future worth? Can it be sorted easily? And How much will it cost to store it?
At this point, questions number one and three are unanswerable, we’re still not far enough removed to be able to truly gauge how much can be gleaned from Twitter’s annals and with the program being less than six weeks old, there are far too many details to be ironed out to generate solid numbers. That leaves us with question two and so far, the answer to that question is yes.
In his article, “What Social Media Means for Search,” Peter Hershberg makes a great point that I had forgotten all about, which is that a year or so ago, Twitter changed their branding from, “What are you doing?” to “What’s happening?” evolving their focus away from the person routines of life and towards “tapping into the now,” guiding their service towards categorization and collectivity versus the individual, something that Google is exploiting now that they have begun to assist with the archiving of tweets and the navigation of on-going chatter.
The service, Google Update, allows you to input a search term, and then either monitor the present flow of discussion, or search backwards through time looking for information relevant to your topic. The site’s display even includes a detailed timeline that can be interacted with, allowing you to look for tweets within a specific time period of a given day. The backlog only goes a few months at this time, but that will inevitably change as Google continues to sort the present while making gains on the past.
Having spent this time in reflection, I must admit that I am still very torn about the decision to preserve Twitter’s archives, but I recognize that it comes from extreme bias. While I enjoy the people that I interact with on a day to day basis, I honestly feel like I’m not encountering any material that is necessary for the betterment of the world. In fact, based on my day to day encounters, I might argue the opposite, that it shouldn’t be saved. However, there is a part of me that understands that my social circle is only a very, very small piece of the world and to just jettison the whole thing would guarantee the loss of at least one baby, along with the bathwater.
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Deborah Zabarenko, & Dan Whitcomb. (2010, June 6). A groundswell against BP on Facebook, Twitter. The Washington Post,p. G.5. Retrieved June 13, 2010, from Washington Post. (Document ID: 2050610421).
Hampp, A., Klaassen, A., York, E., Zmuda, N., Teinowitz, I., & Halliday, J. (2009). Inauguration scorecard: Who seized the day and who stumbled. Advertising Age, 80(3), 3-36. Retrieved from Communication & Mass Media Complete database.
Hershberg, P. (2009). WHAT SOCIAL MEDIA MEANS FOR SEARCH. Advertising Age, 80(11), 40. Retrieved from Communication & Mass Media Complete database.
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Swartz, Jon. "Library of Congress Plans to Archive Twitter Posts." USA TODAY. 15 Apr 2010: B.1. SIRS Researcher. Web. 13 Jun 2010.
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