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Almost from the time the first tweet was posted in 2006, Twitter has played an important role in world events. The platform has been used to record everything from the Arab Spring to the ongoing war in Ukraine. It's also captured our public conversations for years.
Twitter has become integral to civilization today. It’s a place where people document war crimes, discuss key issues, and break and report on news. Lots of official statements by governments and public bodies are now made on Twitter first.
We cannot deny that FB, Twitter and other social networking sites have had a significant impact in current events around the world. The power of social media has allowed our society to be much more knowledgeable of worldwide affairs and news.
It's getting obvious that will be almost impossible to hold such vast amount of information on any servers.
What will happen to it in the future? Since there’s no indication that those formal records of government agencies have ever been archived, or indeed how they’d go about doing that. The US Library of Congress tried that for 8 years and stopped - the data is just too massive.
So, how important are social medias as a host of historical information?
I suspect a lot will be lost or already has been lost since there's so much of it. IMO the problem is that most of what's on social media sites is not worth saving, hell, most of it is not even worth reading as it's just snarky twaddle, thank you notes, family/pet photos, business advertising, and 'me too' statements. I'd hate to foot the bill to save all the mountains of that stuff.
It's a mixed bag for historians. On the bright side social media content is already date/time stamped for you, has the I-D of the sender, has some text already there which allows historians to just cut/paste, and there's often a photo. It can save war correspondents and photographers from being in the battle area and it can get the word out a lot quicker. On the down side is how does a reader / historian know if the alleged date, time, location and subject really are what the sender claims it to be. The NY Times has people out there and/or has ways to independently verify that the content we're seeing actually is what it says it is. That's why a lot of us refer to the NY Times as "The Paper of Record."
Let's hope for all these events that someone, somewhere is gathering up the important stuff so it isn't lost.
In the larger context, the vast majority of human history is long gone, never was stored and we only have a thimble-full of the olympic-sized swimming pool of human existence. So-called "recorded history" only goes back about 6,000 years and most of what happened even during the past 6000 years is gone as well. Even some of our Hollywood movies from the early years are gone, either the film deteriorated or was lost in at least three major fires out there, especially films on the old highly flammable nitrate film media. Excerpt: "Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation claims that "half of all American films made before 1950 and over 90% of films made before 1929 are lost forever." Deutsche Kinemathek estimates that 80–90% of silent films are gone; the film archive's own list contains over 3,500 lost films." So even in the last 100 years we can't even save our own movies, which I find amazing. There are corporate firms, like Iron Mountain, who are in the business of safely storing business records in underground locations safe from fires, floods, and other hazards. I own stock in the firm, it pays a nice dividend, and it could've been used to save these films. Shakes my head....
Another case of lost history is the 1973 fire in St Louis at the Federal government's National Personnel Records Center where 80% of the records were burned up for Army personnel who served between 1912 and 1960. That period of time covered the Army chasing Pancho Villa in 1915, both WW-1 and WW-2, and the Korean War. Many veterans are still alive from WW-2 and the Korean War but there service records are gone.
Google has done a lot to digitize old magazines, some of my railroad magazines from 100+ years ago are now on-line, as well as digitized 40,000,000 books out of an estimated 130,000,000 books known to exist.
It is an interesting issue and I'm willing to bet that there are organizations out there trying to gather the pertinent material and confirm the facts to assure that some degree of historical record is maintained. I've no doubt that people will be researching this history for generations to come, just as they are for WW-2 events. In my own experience, while doing research at a railroad museum in Baltimore, I spoke to a man doing research on our Civil War (1861-1865) and his opinion is that there are yet significant amounts of history from that war to be studied and brought to light. I've a long list of bookmarks for news articles I save for use on these and other forums.
Good topic, hope some smart people can educate us on the topic.
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Last edited by Mike from back east; 11-12-2022 at 06:04 PM..
I don't think anything of value would be lost. There are backups of many things, and nothing on twitter was unique to twitter, it was on other SM and in the media if it was worth anything. So many people have cancelled their SM accounts and nobody has complained about it, nobody misses it.
Nothing will be lost to the government, as the NSA facility in Bluffdale UT, the great digital vacuum cleaner based on algorithms of key words, has anything of 'importance'. As for the general public via Library of Congress, I surmise less than .000000001 percent of anything was of significance.
Using the 500 million tweets per day as of March 2021, and likely trending upward, probably about every 100-150 days there is a tweet worth noting for history, but I'd be hard pressed to think of what it may be that would not have been captured via some other means more meaningful.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ciceropolo
Nothing will be lost to the government, as the NSA facility in Bluffdale UT, the great digital vacuum cleaner based on algorithms of key words, has anything of 'importance'. As for the general public via Library of Congress, I surmise less than .000000001 percent of anything was of significance.
Using the 500 million tweets per day as of March 2021, and likely trending upward, probably about every 100-150 days there is a tweet worth noting for history, but I'd be hard pressed to think of what it may be that would not have been captured via some other means more meaningful.
The British Library also has a web archive, although it is selective, and mainly relates to UK websites.
GCHQ, MI6, and MI5 will reportedly benefit from AWS' data analytics and AI features in landmark cloud deal, which will see the construction of more vast data centres in the UK, with Amazon's main e-commerce company having no access or oversight of the data at all.
The main problem in relation to the US spy agencies are strict EU laws protecting the data of European citizens, which can only be stored in exceptional circumstances. whilst the US itself has to abide by it's constitution and laws in relating to spying on it's domestic population.
Last edited by Brave New World; 11-13-2022 at 04:03 AM..
Much more than twitter will vanish. Most of the internet will shut down as electricity becomes more expensive. We need home heating, lights, streetcars, water pumps, etc. more than we need tweets, flame wars, and television. Newspapers have been printed on low quality paper that rapidly decomposes for decades. History will be what we consider important enough to record on archival quality paper or other durable materials.
Much more than twitter will vanish. Most of the internet will shut down as electricity becomes more expensive. We need home heating, lights, streetcars, water pumps, etc. more than we need tweets, flame wars, and television. Newspapers have been printed on low quality paper that rapidly decomposes for decades. History will be what we consider important enough to record on archival quality paper or other durable materials.
Genealogy is my hobby. A lot of paper records have been digitized and are available for viewing online.
The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, movies/videos, moving images, and millions of books.
It also contains “over 734 billion web pages in the Wayback Machine.”
The world’s largest collection of genealogical records is housed in a secure vault located in the mountains near Salt Lake City, Utah….
The vault safeguards more than 3.5 billion images on microfilm, microfiche, and digital media….
The images in the Granite Mountain Records Vault are collected through agreements with archives, libraries, and churches from more than 100 countries. Copies of these records are given free of charge to the record custodian and on occasion, additional copies are provided to replace records that may have been lost in a natural disaster or fire.
Much more than twitter will vanish. Most of the internet will shut down as electricity becomes more expensive. We need home heating, lights, streetcars, water pumps, etc. more than we need tweets, flame wars, and television. Newspapers have been printed on low quality paper that rapidly decomposes for decades. History will be what we consider important enough to record on archival quality paper or other durable materials.
Apparently in the past, a huge amount of electricity was used to mine crypto currency. You can store data on things that don’t require data to operate all the time. Yes, a lot of it is stored on the cloud now, but in the event that electricity is an issue, you can move back to physical media that can store items without requiring power.
I would guess that most of the important twitter content is duplicated elsewhere, mainly because it was shared and people commented on it in other media. I don’t think we lost a ton when MySpace went away, for example.
I suspect a lot will be lost or already has been lost since there's so much of it. IMO the problem is that most of what's on social media sites is not worth saving, hell, most of it is not even worth reading as it's just snarky twaddle, thank you notes, family/pet photos, business advertising, and 'me too' statements. I'd hate to foot the bill to save all the mountains of that stuff.
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Let's hope for all these events that someone, somewhere is gathering up the important stuff so it isn't lost.
I suspect that the very most important stuff is preserved by participants in these "conversations." From a historical point of view that will be selective and highly partisan, unfortunately.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike from back east
It's a mixed bag for historians. On the bright side social media content is already date/time stamped for you, has the I-D of the sender, has some text already there which allows historians to just cut/paste, and there's often a photo. It can save war correspondents and photographers from being in the battle area and it can get the word out a lot quicker. On the down side is how does a reader / historian know if the alleged date, time, location and subject really are what the sender claims it to be. The NY Times has people out there and/or has ways to independently verify that the content we're seeing actually is what it says it is. That's why a lot of us refer to the NY Times as "The Paper of Record."
The one reason I still subscribe to the N.Y. Times is the "timesmachine" feature, which preserves "real-feel" copies of all their papers from 1859 to 2002, except, of course, when they were on strike. It is a valuable resource, and I hope the Times doesn't go under the waves soon, though I have my concerns.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike from back east
In the larger context, the vast majority of human history is long gone, never was stored and we only have a thimble-full of the olympic-sized swimming pool of human existence. So-called "recorded history" only goes back about 6,000 years and most of what happened even during the past 6000 years is gone as well.
The Bible, the Norse Sagas, and epics such as Gilgamesh preserve some of what must have been oral history. Otherwise, you definitely have a point.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike from back east
Another case of lost history is the 1973 fire in St Louis at the Federal government's National Personnel Records Center where 80% of the records were burned up for Army personnel who served between 1912 and 1960. That period of time covered the Army chasing Pancho Villa in 1915, both WW-1 and WW-2, and the Korean War. Many veterans are still alive from WW-2 and the Korean War but there service records are gone.
That that was allowed to happen without duplicates being made was an absolute sin.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike from back east
Google has done a lot to digitize old magazines, some of my railroad magazines from 100+ years ago are now on-line, as well as digitized 40,000,000 books out of an estimated 130,000,000 books known to exist.
Let's pray Google doesn't descend into similar financial or human chaos. Being a bankruptcy lawyer I'm not hopeful. Every publicly held company is one or two LBO's away from Chapter 11 or worse, Chapter 7.
Quote:
Originally Posted by elnina
Twitter has become integral to civilization today. It’s a place where people document war crimes, discuss key issues, and break and report on news. Lots of official statements by governments and public bodies are now made on Twitter first.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike from back east
Good topic, hope some smart people can educate us on the topic.
I second that. Heartily. And as far as ElNina's comments, Twitter has never made money. I can't believe that this risk was not under active concern previously. Maybe it was.
Broadly speaking, there’s already a ton of lost media that covers the entire spectrum from film to printed articles. This isn’t specifically directed at Twitter, but oftentimes media gets lost without people even realising it. There’s already online content that has vanished over the years, some of it possibly got good.
As mentioned earlier, a good number of movies from the early 30th century are gone for good. An example would be the first Titanic film ever released, all the way back in 1912, just a few months after the disaster. The only thing that survives are a few production stills. Given the limits of technology at the time, its not going to be a visual spectacle, yet still has historical merit.
I hope it’s alright if I share this website. It might be of interest.
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