In April of 2010, The Library of Congress announced it would begin archiving the entirety of Twitter — all the way back to 2006. From the Library of Congress blog:

An element of our mission at the Library of Congress is to collect the story of America and to acquire collections that will have research value. So when the Library had the opportunity to acquire an archive from the popular social media service Twitter, we decided this was a collection that should be here.

It’s a noble idea and one I’m sure data analysts will take advantage of in ways we aren’t imagining yet for decades to come, but “the story of America” can be an impersonal one. It doesn’t matter that The Library of Congress hasn’t opened its Twitter archives yet (Nancy Scola, via Politico, says it’s not even close), because they’re not necessary for the most interesting future applications of our current digital footprints.

For the record, I’m writing this here.

Supposing our social media output does get archived in some way, the people who will be most interested in it will undoubtedly be our descendants. Not only would it be totally cool to browse through your grandfather’s 70-year-old Facebook posts, it would also be way easier than digging through boxes of photo albums. The search bar will revolutionize the way we learn about those direct relatives who are far enough removed for us to call them our ancestors.

How exactly this might work is a little more difficult to predict. Facebook and Twitter don’t seem to be going anywhere soon, but to this day I can’t find my own MySpace page, and that’s only about 10 years old. Someone is going to have to find some way to store and organize borderline unquantifiable (and growing) amounts of data. Either that or it all gets deleted when Facebook runs out of money or disk space. For now I’m going to assume this is a problem that’s going to be solved eventually, if only because the Library of Congress had the foresight to start trying just 4 years after Twitter launched.