Twitter histories of events are vanishing
Nowadays, we’re very good at telling history in real time. Live-tweeting, livestreaming, Instagraming, link sharing, instant commenting — everyday lives and major events are recorded and narrated from every angle as they happen. A new study has found, however, that these minutes-old histories may not be built to last.
Two researchers at the Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., working on the mammoth task of curating the social media content that surrounded (and helped shape) the Arab Spring, were struck by their findings — or the gaps therein. Much of the shared online content has already disappeared.
As the Technology Review reported:
A significant proportion of the websites that this social media [around the Arab Spring] points to has disappeared. And the same pattern occurs for other culturally significant events, such as the the H1N1 virus outbreak, Michael Jackson’s death and the Syrian uprising. In other words, our history, as recorded by social media, is slowly leaking away.
http://www.salon.com/2012/09/20/history_as_recorded_on_twitter_is_vanishing/
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