Once On Twitter, Always WHERE?
Cheep! Cheep! Cheep! But certainly not CHEAP!!! (yes, Twitter Fans, we love your Tweets, but if the Fed does archive all the Tweets ever Tweeted, that certainly will cost taxpayers more than a Peep!) More Government $ spent on such "fluff" is nothing to Sing About!
We've heard it time and again: "Once on the Internet, always on the Internet."
These are wise words I've heard at pretty much every single workshop I've attended on social networking.
So when my favorite news source, Morning Edition, had a little item on the Library of Congress' decision to archive all gazillion Tweets from the earliest to forever, I was pretty stunned.
I mean, sure, it's possible to do that, but why would they want to?
I've spent a lot of the last couple of days doing my taxes. There are a lot of things that the Federal Government does that I don't mind paying for. That would include taking care of our service men and women, enforcing some health and safety standards for food and drugs, crime fighting and anti-trust stuff.
But archiving tweets?
Some of them, maybe. I mean people did send tweets from Haiti during the earthquake and other important things that happen around the world. And maybe if an anthropologist wants to get an idea of how we lived, some tweets could shed some life on our social networking habits.
But that's propbably a pretty small part of what we send out there on Twitter or Facebook.
Sorry, little Tweetie Bird, I just don't think most of your stuff is important enough to save in a Federal repository. And I'm not sure how I feel about the Feds archiving the inane stuff I've posted on there - not that it's embarrassing or anything. A lot of it is just irrelevant, and certainly not worthy of the costs of my government gathering it and keeping it forever.
I remember back in the 1970 as a young Nader's Raider, I wrote a long report on how airlines and federal agencies handled consumer complaints. Little Injustices: Airline Consumer Complaint Redress Mechanisms got printed, bound, a copyright, and we sent it off to the Library of Congress where it would be stored forever. And I remember thinking that was so freakin' cool! And when I heard this morning's news, the rather august institution sounded like it was being trivialized.
And this post is making me sound really old. Oh, dear! I guess I am!
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