[Web4lib] The end of MySpace, SecondLife, and Twitter

[sarah boyd]

Hello, everybody

This is my first time posting!  And I've followed this discussion with
interest.  Microsoft and the British Library teamed in May to create an
archive of British emails--called Email Britain.  The purpose is to save for
posterity a "snapshot of British life" in emails "for generations to come."
While email isn't social software, there is a great interest in recording
these kinds of things.  Maybe in 100 years the "Who ate my muffin" email
will be seen as quaint...


 link to email Britain:   http://www.newhotmail.co.uk/emailbritain/

Sarah Boyd
Reference Dept
Columbus Public Library
Columbus, GA  31906- Show quoted text -


On 6/20/07, Rebecca Parker <RParker at groupwise.swin.edu.au> wrote:
>
> Hi list members,
>
> I always follow the conversations on this list with interest, but as I
> finished my Masters in Information Management (Library and Information
> Studies) last week, I finally consider myself qualified to make my first
> post!
>
> I'm the first to admit that I'm not as sold on the validity of online
> social networks as many in this group. I don't have a Second Life
> avatar, I've never used Twitter or MySpace, and I only use Facebook to
> keep up with truant friends overseas. Yet the Lance Ulanoff article was
> so trashy and arrogant that even I objected to it! However, I think he
> actually gave us some scope for intelligent discussion, (mostly
> unintentionally I suspect). The link to John C Dvorak's column
> (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2141525,00.asp) in particular
> provides us with a topic for real scholarly debate, both on this list
> and outside it.
>
> Dvorak suggests that we consider archiving Twitter conversations for
> future access. This is a notion that clearly exposes him to ridicule
> (especially from Ulanoff), but while no one disputes the content of
> Twitter conversations is ephemeral, immature, banal, and often downright
> silly, Twitter might just prove to be a powerful means of recording
> social history.
>
> Dvorak argues that we would be very excited to discover conversations
> between ordinary, everyday people from the past (his example is of
> teenage girls chatting in 1907). I know I would be thrilled by that
> opportunity; as a former student of history, it was always the
> day-to-day experiences of people like us that fascinated me most, rather
> than the battles fought by well-known public figures. The persistent
> sale of biographies, memoirs and diaries of both famous and unknown
> people suggests that I'm not alone. We continue to be interested in our
> past and (attempt to) use our understanding of where we come from to
> help interpret and design our future; the mere fact that we fail, and
> regularly make the same mistakes over and over again, cements the
> importance of the continued archiving and preservation of our history,
> recording both the dynamic successes and the dismal failures. Future
> generations should be afforded access to the same knowledge that has
> made us who we are today, even if, like us, they don't know how to use
> it.
>
> Digital preservation is a complex process, not least because of the
> never-ending problem of format obsolescence. The climate of cyclic
> destruction perpetuated by the Web, where content is destroyed or
> replaced regularly without a single thought for preservation, is our
> constant enemy. Yet the biggest difficulty of all is not knowing what to
> preserve, because we don't know what future generations will want from
> us. We can't archive everything (we just don't have the means, or
> especially the funding, for that), so we need to make educated guesses
> about what will be interesting or valuable to our descendants. Our
> Twitter conversations could be useful both for ordinary people as a
> means of entertainment, and for academics as the basis for scholarship.
> If future generations might potentially study linguistic patterns, the
> history of technology, education/intellect and social climate all from
> an archive of inane teenage prattle, why shouldn't we make it available
> to them, even if it seems absurd to us?
>
> Hope this provokes some discussion.
>
> Kind regards
> Rebecca
>
> ---------------------------------------------
> Rebecca Parker
>
> Digital Repository Content Manager
> Swinburne University of Technology
> John Street, Hawthorn VIC 3122
>
> Phone: +61 3 9214 4806
> Email:   rparker at groupwise.swin.edu.au
>
>
>
> From:   "Dan Lester" <dan at riverofdata.com>
> To:     <web4lib at webjunction.org>
> Date:   21/06/2007 03:15 am
> Subject:        [Web4lib] The end of MySpace, SecondLife, and Twitter
>
> and maybe Ning as well?
>
>
>
> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2145408,00.asp
>
>
>
> I'm not quite as positive as the author is, but he's looking at it from
> what I consider to be an appropriate view.
>
>
>
> dan, old enough to remember when "Push Technology" was the next big
> thing.  It has been long enough I've forgotten the name of the desktop
> app that everybody had to have....
>
>
>
>
>
> It's not what you take when you leave this world behind you;
>
> it's what you leave behind you when you go.
>
>
>
> dan at riverofdata.com
>
> Dan Lester, Boise, Idaho, USA
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