Are you a Twitter user? Then congratulations — your everyday, 140-character updates may have won you a place in the Library of Congress. The venerable institution is adding the vast majority of tweets sent since March 2006 to its online archives to save them for posterity. Given Twitter users post around 55 million messages a day, that's a lot of data. Is it a good idea to record every spur-of-the-moment tweet?
It's a worthy snapshot of American culture: Twitter's content might seem trivial, says Jared Keller in The Atlantic, but it provides "important insights into the minds of average Americans." Almost one in five internet users in America use Twitter to share their thoughts. Everything on it, even "feverish anticipation of the newest Justin Bieber album," is evidence of the "constantly metamorphosing character of American culture." That's worth preserving.
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