If you are an avid reader, you may be well aware of two of the finest works of science fiction written over the past 100 years: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. In Brave New World, Huxley attempts to warn us of a future plagued with scientific utopianism — a world in which people are just victims of propaganda to be manipulated. In 1984, Orwell describes a petrifying dangers that man, in search of a utopia may create via government in order to have an orderly society, but at the expense of the freedom of the people. In the book “Big Brother” is always watching, “Ignorance is strength” and “freedom is slavery.”
On April 15, the U.S. Library of Congress announced it will start saving and archiving tweets from around the world due to a new partnership with Twitter. Each public tweet from 2006, when they first began to date, will be archived. This means that all information that is on the public time line, from Twitpics, to your location, to any link, will be recorded for all of history for anyone to search and study.
This just displays how significant the Internet is in this digital age. After six months, all public tweets will be made available to the Library of Congress. It has been estimated that between 50 to 60 millions of tweets are published each day. Biz Stone, one of the founders of the micro-blogging service wrote “… there are some specifics regarding this arrangement. Only after a six-month delay can the Tweets be used for internal library use, for non-commercial research, public display by the library itself, and preservation.”
So be leery of what you send out in your limited 140 character space, for if you plan to run for Congress or any political office, your tweets will be available for your opponents to use anyway they see fit. –torrance stephens, ph.d.
