Do you tweet? Then consider yourself published

The announcement by the Library of Congress that it has acquired the entire Twitter database of messages – several billions of it – might seem like trivial to some.

In fact, the only trivial thing I can think of, is that if you tweet, you can now consider yourself officially published. Not many people have achieved that in their lifetime.

The truth is, that anyone believing that their publicly broadcast messages over Twitter are somehow erased or fade into some sort of digital purgatory needs to have their noob status checked. Anything you send off by hitting that “tweet” button is permanently stored.

The question that arises is, who will benefit from the storage of billions of messages, some as plain as “Yummy, just had lasagna” or as incriminating as “FTW! I banged Missy the other night in her parents’ bedroom!”.

Does the Library of Congress believe that the terabytes of information is of some inherent value, even if it includes president Obama’s first tweet or those of important politicians or celebrities? Is there some other ‘force’ and motive behind this acquisition of information?

I’m not sure what to believe of this massive acquisition of data, however, as with every amount of raw data it doesn’t matter what you have, it’s how you use it. The analysis and processing of such an immense database can generate a lot of important secondary data, that cannot normally be obtained by observing feeds or keywords alone.

In today’s digital world, information can be cross-compared to other data, combined, reformatted – even altered – to the extent that it becomes an alter ego of someone, for purposes known only to the handler of this digital information.

And that’s precisely when things become dangerous.

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