Today's Ephemera, Tomorrow's Historical Treasure Trove

Image by koalazymonkey via Flickr

Technology Thursday

Back in the days before weblogs, there were was an active community of online diarists or journalers. The vast majority of these writers were women. When weblogs became all the rage, that community and that history of writing down one's musings in a reverse chronological order was often ignored. I was not an online journaler back then, but I read many of them and still do. I've now been keeping a weblog (at some points in time, several weblogs) for more than a decade. I have never understood the inclination of some to scoff at public writing (or 'reading out loud' as I like to refer it to sometimes).

In fact, I think that there is value to these diaries apart from the writing, reading, and community-building that takes place. I've written before that I really like the concept of "ambient awareness" and that there is real social value in even seemingly-ephemeral status updates of the sort that Facebook and Twitter encourage. But, even beyond that, I think that all of this writing and documenting will have immense value to future historians, sociologists, archaeologists, and so on.

However, none of this value will be realized if the companies that are collecting and storing this data refuse to make it accessible. Moreover, there's a paradox here. On the one hand, we are constantly cautioned that anything we do or say online will follow us forever, keep us from getting jobs, and consign us to homelessness. On the other hand, we are also constantly cautioned to make backups and that catastrophic disk drive failures happen often. Unfortunately, many social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter make it difficult to impossible to create backups of your own material. They even make it difficult to find your own things that are presumably still in their databases somewhere. Scott Rosenberg wrote about this annoying phenomenon recently:

Meanwhile, Facebook is even less helpful. Lord knows what happens to the old stuff there. Is there any way to find what you wrote on Facebook last year? I hope so, for the sake of the millions of people who are chronicling their lives on Mark Zuckerberg’s servers. But I’ve certainly never been able to find it.

In fact, Facebook is relentlessly now-focused. And because it uses its own proprietary software that it regularly changes, there is no way to build your own alternate set of archive links to old posts and pages the way you can on the open Web. Facebook users are pouring their hearts and souls into this system and it is tossing them into the proverbial circular file.

There are several more links and background in this piece. Definitely worth checking out. I find myself circling back around (to the extent that I ever really left) and thinking again about where I want the repository of my own content to be. For any writing or photos or even ephemeral status updates, I think it's worth considering where the primary storage for that material is. It's one thing to re-post things to, say, Facebook, but I'd increasingly advise against using Facebook as sole or primary publisher. There's a lot still to be worked out generally regarding expectations about ownership and availability of user-generated content. Facebook in particular inspires no confidence that the people in charge there are thoughtful at all about these things. Even companies not as obnoxious as Facebook are not always doing great in these areas. Bear these issues in mind when considering how to share content online.

Comments

[stacy]

This is a really thoughtful post. I post things on Facebook (like pictures) but they're also on our computer and backed up on an external back up drive. But I don't save status updates, interesting articles, and other stuff I post anywhere else. I know Facebook stores this stuff somewhere but it's definitely not accessible to ordinary users. I can see, though, that a lot of this stuff will be a treasure trove for historians, anthropolgists, and others down the line. If they can figure out how to get at it!