Hi, Richard Forno's comment reminded me that when Google bought the Deja Usenet archive the same issues were raised. All the voluntary, often spontaneous 'my-2-cents' comments suddenly became a profile for each user even though by the Berne Convention these were copyright by the poster and required permission for commercial (ie Google) use. For anyone interested in this history, it is told at there URLs: 1. Ronda Hauben, "Culture Clash:The Google Purchase of the 1995-2001 Usenet Archive And the Online Community", Telepolis, February 21, 2001. http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/te/7013/1.html 2.Ronda Hauben,"Commodifying Usenet and the Usenet Archive or Continuing the Online Cooperative Usenet Culture?", Science Studies 15:(2002), p.61-68. http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/usenetstts.pdf 3. Google Obscures Decision Making Processes http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?menu=c10400&no=3860... 4. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine", http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf Take care. Jay ------------------------------
Message: 3 Date: Wed, 14 Apr 2010 19:15:19 -0400 From: Richard Forno <rforno@infowarrior.org> To: Michael Zimmer <zimmerm@uwm.edu> Cc: Aoir AoIR-L <air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Subject: Re: [Air-L] Library of Congress Acquires Entire (Public) Twitter Archive Message-ID: <99336861-1D25-4726-B1EC-26D14523E18D@infowarrior.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Donning my privacy hat for a minute ....
I'm not exactly enthused by this idea, especially w/o Twitter/LOC giving folks the option to purge their tweets or clean up their streams that will appear under (in many cases) their real names for all posterity. Granted, that would undermine the purpose of collecting the entire "Twitterspace" for the LOC's stated purposes, but how many non-geekish Twitterati will be upset/incensed/enraged that their stuff is now a matter of permanent public record at the world's largest library? (Obviously, the whole "you-were-warned-and-should-have-known-what-you-were-getting-into-and/or-doing" rationale can apply in many cases.)
Yes, there's "social networking" as a general concept, and I'll endorse it completely. But I'll also suggest there's derivatives to that concept called "public" social networking (ie, anyone can read/post, the owner doesn't care) and "private" social networking (ie, the owner uses and restricts their activities on a given SNS within their private social circles.) Certainly, Twitter can facilitate online interaction --- but bravo to those savvy enough to make their Twitter streams private/friends-only at the time they set up their accounts.
Would the LOC do the same thing witih IRC chat logs? IRC is pretty much Twitter-esque. Or is that too daunting a task because *anyone* can throw up and run an IRC server, but Twitter is a centralised repository and thus an easy thing to try and archive?
Doffing privacy hat now.
-rf