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Another Day in the Digital Coal Mines
Nov. 20th, 2022 07:59 amTwitter’s potential collapse could wipe out vast records of recent human history
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/11/1063162/twitters-imminent-collapse-could-wipe-out-vast-records-of-recent-human-history/
Part of what makes Twitter’s potential collapse uniquely challenging is that the “digital public square” has been built on the servers of a private company, says O’Connor’s colleague Elise Thomas, senior OSINT analyst with the ISD. It’s a problem we’ll have to deal with many times over the coming decades, she says: “This is perhaps the first really big test of that.” Twitter’s ubiquity, its adoption by nearly a quarter of a billion users in the last 16 years, and its status as a de facto public archive, has made it a gold mine of information, says Thomas.
I started thinking about this around the summer of 2012, when I realized that LiveJournal was well and truly on its way out. I was working on my dissertation, and I was coming up against the fact that a lot of the progressive literary movements I was trying to describe got started on LiveJournal before moving elsewhere (usually to Twitter). Like, you can't talk about Roxanne Gay or N. K. Jemisin without talking about LiveJournal. Understanding that all of these conversations were in danger of vanishing caused me to realize that one of the most valuable things I could do with my work was to try to preserve and explain as many of these digital artifacts as I could.
( Read more... )
I guess what I'm saying is that while it's important to create archives, it's also important to understand and respect the work of people who use these archives. You can preserve all the data you want, but that doesn't mean much if the work of the people who excavate and explain this data isn't treated as legitimate scholarship that's worthy of support.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/11/1063162/twitters-imminent-collapse-could-wipe-out-vast-records-of-recent-human-history/
Part of what makes Twitter’s potential collapse uniquely challenging is that the “digital public square” has been built on the servers of a private company, says O’Connor’s colleague Elise Thomas, senior OSINT analyst with the ISD. It’s a problem we’ll have to deal with many times over the coming decades, she says: “This is perhaps the first really big test of that.” Twitter’s ubiquity, its adoption by nearly a quarter of a billion users in the last 16 years, and its status as a de facto public archive, has made it a gold mine of information, says Thomas.
I started thinking about this around the summer of 2012, when I realized that LiveJournal was well and truly on its way out. I was working on my dissertation, and I was coming up against the fact that a lot of the progressive literary movements I was trying to describe got started on LiveJournal before moving elsewhere (usually to Twitter). Like, you can't talk about Roxanne Gay or N. K. Jemisin without talking about LiveJournal. Understanding that all of these conversations were in danger of vanishing caused me to realize that one of the most valuable things I could do with my work was to try to preserve and explain as many of these digital artifacts as I could.
( Read more... )
I guess what I'm saying is that while it's important to create archives, it's also important to understand and respect the work of people who use these archives. You can preserve all the data you want, but that doesn't mean much if the work of the people who excavate and explain this data isn't treated as legitimate scholarship that's worthy of support.
