The Huffington Post has rounded up the ’15 Disgusting Responses to Grammys’ Same-Sex Wedding Ceremony’ according to my email. A screen capture of them is below.
What makes these a quote of the day? The fact that they will live on in infamy thanks to the Library of Congress’s acquisition of twitter feeds. For those who may not recall, the Library of Congress bought access to Twitter feeds in a effort to get perspectives on history as it happens from ordinary folks who are living it:
The library will archive the collected works of Twitter, the blogging service, whose users currently send a daily flood of 55 million messages, all that contain 140 or fewer characters.
Library officials explained the agreement as another step in the library’s embrace of digital media. Twitter, the Silicon Valley start-up, declared it “very exciting that tweets are becoming part of history.”
Academic researchers seem pleased as well. For hundreds of years, they say, the historical record has tended to be somewhat elitist because of its selectivity. In books, magazines and newspapers, they say, it is the prominent and the infamous who are written about most frequently.
[snip]
“This is an entirely new addition to the historical record, the second-by-second history of ordinary people,” said Fred R. Shapiro, associate librarian and lecturer at the Yale Law School. — ‘Library of Congress Will Save Tweets’; Steve Lohr; The New York Times; April 14, 2010
In the future when the Library runs their exhibit of gay rights struggle for equality, we’ll get to see some of these Tweets again, but viewed through the perspective of disbelief that anyone would have once thought like that.
