
The 210-year-old, Library of Congress is the "guardian of knowledge and cultural history," andas such they have taken it upon themselves to keep record of all of the countries cultural history. This now includes tweets. The New York times wrote an articleabout the decision of the LOC. This means that the 55 million plus tweets, from all users - from politicians like President Barrack Obama to celebrities like Ashton Kutcher to average-joe's like me - will be saved in the Library of Congress...that's a lot of data! Academic's have looked at this as a good move for the LOC, saying for "of years, ... the historical record has tended to be somewhat elitist because of its selectivity. In books, magazines and newspapers, ... it is the prominent and the infamous who are written about most frequently," and the everyday people are passed by. I believe that the intent is good, it makes me question where it will stop. Are they going to start archiving all Facebook accounts? What about the next big thing? And also, with an ever-growing mass of information, where is it all going to be stored? Since it is electronic, I am not worried about environmental implications, but do they just plan on constantly increasing the server size, or do they have some other plan?
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