- 44 Maagnum
Every tweet since Twitter’s 2006 debut has made its way into the Library of Congress. That’s every contribution to the twittersphere you, I, Charlie Sheen, and the BronxZooCobra has ever made in addition to whatever all those other people have happened to tweet over the years. Yes, this includes the alleged twitpic confirmed twitpics of Democratic Representative Anthony Weiner's wiener. In consideration of just how staggering this volume of data is, a quick glance at stats provided by Twitter for March 2011 provides some more or less unfathomable numbers to ponder. While it took over three years to reach the first billion tweets, currently about 140 million tweets are let loose every day. What took three years now takes a week. Even more staggering is the fact that in the one month span of March, 2011 nearly half a million new twitter accounts were created daily. Shocking. As of April, 2010 Twitter had transferred over 100 terabytes of material to the Library of Congress - a figure which has likely more than doubled by now. Presumably, the fact that the Library of Congress is going to the trouble of archiving this material implies that someone somewhere views this data as an invaluable resource for academics of the Internet age: present and future. Let’s take a closer look at what future hordes of grad students might glean from our tweets shall we?
The real time impact of Twitter, Facebook and social media as a whole has been demonstrated repeatedly. Tweets helped fuel global indignation regarding the 2008 Iranian election as well as provide stimulus and information not only to rebels on the ground, but the outside world as to the events unfolding across the Middle East in the past six months. Such considerations certainly played heavily on the United Nations’ decision to declare Internet access a human right and the attempted denial of Internet access a breach of unalienable personal liberties. Certainly historians studying these dramatic global events will turn to Twitter in their analyses, however what of social historians gleaning tidbits on the life and times of the burgeoning Internet age?
Without doubt Twitter places the historian in the off the cuff, uncensored mind of the individual. In terms of real time, immediate reactions to events Twitter is unparalleled. The greatest battle the future historian will face is the sheer enormity of the data set, yet it is a data set born in the digital age. Hundreds of billions of tweets are in fact far more manageable than the present reality of historical materials scattered in microfilm and loose-leaf across the globe in University and National Archives. A few keystrokes into a search engine and our future historian is well on his way. With this in mind, if not for our children’s historians but our children’s children’s historians, for goodness sakes keep hashtagging! #psa That Twitter is free, public and searchable means that legally speaking graduate students have every right to peruse our various online indiscretions, yet it seems unlikely that Twitter’s academic value lies in the musings of the individual. As much as I would like to believe my tweets provide invaluable insight into the world as it exists around us, it is nevertheless a petty and shallow medium. 140 characters simply cannot carry any depth and that is certainly a critical element of Twitter’s meteoric rise to prominence. That said, if tweets lack the depth necessary to be effective source material our future historian must turn elsewhere for value - the remarkable means by which Twitter reflects global cultural significance. A trait which will only continue to develop as Twitter’s demographics continue to broaden.
Without further ado, queue case study:
Bro-Patriotism and the Death of Osama bin Laden
Easily my favorite twitter metric is tweets per second. As a ready made metric of global cultural impact nothing like it has ever been seen. For the first time ever there is an available comparison between the cultural relevance of Lady Gaga’s meat costume and let’s say President Obama’s goals for improved Israeli-Palestinian relations. Needless to say - Gaga wins out in the end. And ultimately Gaga will always win out unless going head to head with Osama Bin Laden: cultural champion of the Twitter age. Of course more recent events are weighted more heavily in a purely numerical metric like tweets per second given the ever increasing number of twitter users, however it is safe to say that the death of Osama bin Laden struck a serious chord within our collective psyche.
The metric itself is remarkably precise. As the handy chart demonstrates, significant announcements over the course of the evening of May 1, 2011 correlate perfectly with peaks in the data. (The hourly peaks are the bi-product of auto-tweeting updates) Incidentally the evening of May 1, 2011 represents the highest sustained period of tweets ever. In the one hour span from 11pm til 12am, tweets easily surpassed 4000 per second. Roughly 15 Million tweets in one hour composed largely of uninspired “USA! USA! #binladen” derivatives. Certainly not the place for dramatic insight into the importance and consequence of the event at hand yet what can be taken away?
Did the death of Osama Bin Laden reveal the inner bro-patriot in every American? A glimpse perhaps into a shared American common ground apart from our rather dramatic political differences? Or do the tweets reveal nothing more than the cathartic release of shared loss through a relatively anonymous medium where it’s alright to be a bit douchey? Arguments can and will be made on all these points yet hopefully will be recognized as objectively incomplete without drawing from broader source material. The most effective use of Twitter with regards to the historical record for the time being is its ability to draw attention to the fact that, “Holy shit people really cared about Osama, Beiber, Obama, *generic celebrity gaffe*, etc.” While the digital record will revolutionize the study of History, it will not be done on the basis of Twitter alone. We are each leaving an unprecedented written record scattered across the digital ether. Albeit this legacy is one fraught with privacy and accessibility issues, it must not be discarded for the low hanging fruit. Twitter is of course not merely a historical curiosity of its own ends but a powerful tool with it’s greatest attribute being accessibility. Yet in reality it is a mere drop in the ocean relative to the material locked away in servers and hard drives across the globe. The trick will be to access these materials amidst the changing dynamics of privacy within the Internet age. For now however Twitter is free, public and searchable and by all means the most must be made out of this burgeoning research not only in the study of history but throughout the social sciences. #neverstoplearning
No comments:
Post a Comment