For this week's blog I thought i would discuss some random thoughts that I have been having regarding Flickr, Facebook, and other social networking websites.
I was having a conversation with some coworkers the other day about joining a particular group on Facebook. We were discussing why each of us decided not to join the group, which basically amounted to all of us deciding that it would not be in our best professional interest. During this conversation, one of my coworkers stated she did not have a Facebook profile and had no intention of setting one up. She said, she had a Friendster account when it came out, then set up a MySpace page after everyone told her she had to check it out, and is now being told she has to set up a Facebook profile. As she put it, "no way, not again." But this got me thinking about how fast technology changes and how we are always playing catch up. As we join and quit (or more appropriately discontinue using until forgotten about) these social networking websites, what happens to the information we save, transfer, and share. When we join these websites, we post pictures, blogs, videos, we share personal and professional information. Coming from an archivist and a librarian's point of view, how do we insure vital information created through blog postings, image sharing, and so on, is being preserved (or properly disposed of). Will we later discover information, that at the time of its creation was deemed either unimportant or was forgotten about, that turns out to be historically important. It may seem unimportant, but you never know when a blog posting might be the beginning of the next big invention. You just never know. So how do we properly organize, save, retrieve, and delete the vast and uncontrolled amount information being created over the web? How do we control the web while keeping it free and open?
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I don't remember where I read this (and maybe later I'll google it) but I definitely came across an article discussing this same concern recently and it called for greater interoperability between social networking sites so that given the choice to "move on" from MySpace to Facebook, a user can easily transfer their content.
ReplyDeleteI think this is also possible using blogs and believe it was a question WordPress asked me when I was setting up mine (did I want to "transfer" an existing blog? or something like that).
I think I read the same thing Anne-Marie read, or something similar, and it also brings up some interesting questions about who owns the information you put online. You? Facebook/MySpace/Friendster? And again, who gets your email passwords when you die? How will they access your emails if they turn out to be somehow valuable? It's a good question, the question of how we will archive all this digital information. I hear that the National Archive still doesn't have the tools to handle emails or websites created by the government. So, yeah. We should work on that.
ReplyDeleteThe New York Times reported extensively on Facebook's recent changing of, and then reversal of, their terms of service. We will be reading about that for our class after spring break, fyi. But, I think it is a good question to think of how users can be responsible for their online lives, as Jess suggests above.
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