(* Translations for the TI – “Twitter-impaired”: OMG: “Oh My God”;  GR8: “Great”; Twttr: “Twitter”; IC: “I see”; LOC: “Library of Congress”;  Itz: “It’s”; 4: “for”; Deets: “Details”;  TTYL: “Talk To You Later”; RLWNM: “Random Letters With No Meaning”)

In a critically important and bold act of government intervention, it was announced last week that the US Library of Congress (henceforth LOC) will soon be digitally archiving the entire collection of public tweets dating all the way back to Twitter’s inception in March 2006. How many tweets will that be? Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, many of which are vaguely intelligible, with the total to date numbering in the billions. It would take the average person reading 16 hours a day over six thousand years to read all the tweets posted to date or a long weekend to read all the ones having any remote historical significance.

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