You know you are in the Information Age when a historical infant, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s first tweet from 2006, is shelved next to a historical giant, the American Declaration of Independence, at the US Library of Congress in Washington D.C. The revelation of Twitter’s rapid rise through history has been covered in media outlets across the globe, most gawking in awe, with a few dissenting voices, (well okay one – me), feeling a little uneasy about where in the world Twitter will lead us next. It seems that every day since its inception there is some new achievement for the ‘social media’ tool: Obama’s first tweet, the first tweet from outer space, and the first novel published via twitter, 140 characters at a time (a modern emulation of Dr. Seuss’s 50 word vocabulary in Green Eggs and Ham), to mention a few. Perhaps tweeting is getting out of hand, though out of hand of what I cannot say. As of April 2010, Twitter has a whopping 105,000,000 users worldwide and each 24-hours another 300,000 sign up – but I am not one of them.
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I have seen the rise and fall of several social networking phenomena, friendster for example, to question whether Twitter will stand the test of time. Will it become a historical anecdote that future generations make fun of like teenagers looking at graduation photos of their parents, or will it replace inventions like the telephone as a dominant form of human communication? Will the first tweet be as ‘revolutionary’ as the document it now sits beside, or will it flop like mini disks? In addition to its new hallowed home next to the Whitehouse, every tweet since 2006, including yours, will also be held in an electronic database at the library. Another reason to perhaps hold off on tweeting a little while longer.
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One last thought, in George Orwells’ 1984, a language called Newspeak was created by the ruling party to limit the ability of citizens to think abstractly. By removing words from the language and shrinking vocabularies, the hypothetical regime hoped to ensure unquestioning support of its rule and limit the very ability of human’s to question. While by no means is Twitter’s 140 characters a government conspiracy to stupify us all and hold us down, it certainly poses some food for thought.
