Twitter and Collective Memory

This semester I attended the course of Media and Collective Memory. We approached the topics concerning history and the way media reports on it. Basically, the role of the television, radio, press and the Internet was emphasized. Unfortunately, the issue of social networking sites was not discussed despite its importance.
However, I found an elaboration on it in the article written by Maggie Shiels entitled Congress to archive every tweet ever posted publicly
Generally, the Library of Congress is to archive every single public tweet ever made. The digital archive will include tweets from President Barack Obama on the day he was elected as well as the first tweet from co-founder Jack Dorsey. Google plan to finish all of the archive by the end of the summer (from March 2006).

Twitter is claimed to be a valuable source of historical record; it is a source of collective memory. In the era of witnessing, we use social networking sites to comment on the events important for us. For instance, people reacted on twitter in the case of the Iranian election last year, the Mumbai bombing, the Haiti earthquake,
and the downing of the passengers in the Hudson river.

"As a historian you will be able to look back at that and understand what people felt. The same with the healthcare legislation that recently passed. You can look back and say what where people talking about and have those views changed over time? We think that will be really useful."

In my opinion, also facebook plays an important role in the process of presenting collective memory. Last week we could observe post made by Polish people about the plane crash and the death of the President, Lech Kaczyński. There are also facebook groups formed, commemorating events established concerning this tragic event.