Future historians probably won’t understand our internet, and that’s OK
The internet once promised to offer archivists an unprecedented opportunity to record and track our era. But with social media silos offering “pervasive, unique, personalized, non-repeatable” experiences, it is proving increasingly difficult to preserve our internet.
Every major social-networking service uses opaque algorithms to shape what data people see. Why does Facebook show you this story and not that one? No one knows, possibly not even the company’s engineers. Outsiders know basically nothing about the specific choices these algorithms make. Journalists and scholars have built up some inferences about the general features of these systems, but our understanding is severely limited. So, even if the LOC has the database of tweets, they still wouldn’t have Twitter.
This Link was mentioned on duncanstephen.co.uk