Chase the Setting Sun...

Ok, so I heard from my wife on Thursday this week that the Library of Congress will be archiving all tweets retroactively to March 2006. That includes everything from "I just ralphed at this crazy party" to late breaking news, to anything else under the sun. That's roughly 55 MILLION tweets PER DAY.

Now there are obviously good things and bad things about this. We can all see that bad side. Drunken ridiculous tweets are going to be immortalized in the Library of Congress Archives where people a few hundred years from now are going to be seeing them and thinking we were insane. There's definitely that going against it.

I think this is a pretty cool idea. If you think about it, since the Library started archiving it has mostly been distinguished authors, journalists, newspapers, magazines, whatever. Which of course give a pretty good representation of culture. With Twitter being in the archives now it gives people hundreds of years from now a minute by minute timeline of our culture. It shows what topics were trending on any given minute of any day or month; everything from Justin Beiber, to American Idol to the President and politics. They will be able to hear from the mouths (or fingers) of individual American's what it was like living through a big recession, or what it was like having family members in the armed forces. Even things as simple as what it was like when their favorite celebrity won a dance show.

It's about time we started archiving exactly who we really are. Of course, this is going to downgrade us in the eyes of many in the years to come. At the same time though, it might be one of the easiest way to document history. We will be able to go back and say at any moment in history what was happening in different cities, states, and countries. We will be able to see what the scores were of sporting events, what the emotion was in the stadium as a team came from behind to take the victory in the biggest game of the year.

I think, as crazy as this might sound, this is a very good step in the right direction. Of course, there are plenty of downsides to it but over all I think it is a pretty cool idea.