Why Historians Love Twitter

There's a great post by Julia Baird over at Newsweek.com. It's about the implications and importance of the recent news that the Library of Congress will acquire every tweet, ever. I applaud the move. Social networking is just that, social. It's not inherently private. In the future, historians, researchers, reporters, genealogists and political operatives are going to pour over those tweets. No doubt, some one running for political office will one day be haunted by something embarrassing they once tweeted. If you can't wait to read my archived tweets, you may follow my twittering ephemera, here.

Politics and junk, self-aggrandizement and social activism, the phony and the genuine, the mad and the sweet. This is the history we are hammering out, daily, in the online world that we consider ephemeral and intimate and yet that is rapidly becoming more concrete and public.

From the Newsweek article, Our True, Tweeting Selves.