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Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets

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Re: Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets

#31

Post by SamBam »

mdoms wrote: post #22
EvanAnderson wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This opinion always reads to me as: "I want to be able to speak in public without fear of consequence." That's never been the case and I don't know why anybody thinks it ever has. Digital technology created infallible memory, to be sure, but memory isn't a new thing.

This is an incredibly toxic way to think about conversation.

Why? If what's being held against you later is so awful that it can't be explained away with "I was immature"/"I was angry in the heat of the moment"/"I have since learned that that's not correct," then it must have been a pretty toxic thing to say in public.

Re: Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets

#32

Post by jowsie »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #19
nanna wrote: post #2

Honestly, I wish tweets were treated like verbal exchanges more than written. Not everything that is said needs to be recorded for perpetuity. If a politician or someone powerful tweets, then sure it might be in someone's interest to record it. Good luck to them. But unless you're someone that people really care about - it should be fine to just delete your tweet for good. If that means something problematic was twee…

This opinion always reads to me as: "I want to be able to speak in public without fear of consequence." That's never been the case and I don't know why anybody thinks it ever has. Digital technology created infallible memory, to be sure, but memory isn't a new thing.

The bigger issue is most of us said/did dumb shit 20+ years ago, but luckily there was no widespread put everything on the internet movement so we get judged by how we are now, not how we was as kids. While I agree people should be held responsible for things they say/do, I also think that at this exact moment in history, people give little to no thought to the idea that people change/grow as they age. Just look at Jenna Marbles on YouTube, she's in self exile because she wore too much fake tan in a video from 10 years ago.

Re: Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets

#34

Post by toomuchtodo »

SamBam wrote: post #28
toomuchtodo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suggest email for such a use case. To have public conversations is to open the door to public criticism in perpetuity of what was discussed. https://definitions.uslegal.com/n/new-york-times-rule/ "New York Times rule is a commonsense rule of ethical conduct that a person should not do anything arguably newsworthy in public or in private that one would mind having reported on the front page of a major newspaper. The…

> or in private . Not sure how email is an answer. It sound like the rule is "don't do/say it at all, if you didn't want it to be public."

In a sense. My point is, you cannot have public conversations and then be aghast when they are stored or captured for later retrieval and critique. That's not a logistics and storage issue, that's a breakdown of critical thinking and nuance in the public sphere (where rational participants would view a tweet or tweet discussion contextually and within the time it occurred, as opposed to present day outrage porn fuel).

The archiving should happen, even if the corpus must go into cold storage ("unavailable to the public") until a time more reasonable, civil discourse over the contents can occur, but those who participate in online conversations should do so cautiously for obvious reasons.

Tangentially, "never put something in writing you wouldn't want to see on the front page of a newspaper" is just good life advice. Have a phone call or in person meeting instead.

Re: Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets

#35

Post by tw04 »

nanna wrote: post #2

Honestly, I wish tweets were treated like verbal exchanges more than written. Not everything that is said needs to be recorded for perpetuity. If a politician or someone powerful tweets, then sure it might be in someone's interest to record it. Good luck to them. But unless you're someone that people really care about - it should be fine to just delete your tweet for good. If that means something problematic was twee…

But they aren't and won't ever be, and people should stop treating them like they are. It's no different than going to your local public square full of 200 people holding camcorders, and making a bunch of stupid statements.

Did we all do stupid stuff when we were younger: absolutely. Would I want the entire world to see what I did as a teenager and judge me for it? Absolutely not.

Which is EXACTLY why I personally think society should just not allow people under about the age of 25 to even be on social media in the first place. I know, I know, that will never happen because insert reason - but if we don't want everyone's actions to be recorded in perpetuity we should probably stop allowing them to post those actions in a forum that's open to the entire world and easily recorded. You can make laws until you're blue in the face, it's not going to stop an individual from saving whatever stupid thing you said or did and leaking it anonymously should the moment present itself.

Re: Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets

#36

Post by showerst »

snicksnak wrote: post #17

Of course this will get weaponized, if it isn't already. We've seen time and time again that a vile old tweet in the wrong hands can be very powerful, it's a ticking time bomb. Think 5 or even 10+ years down the road, some of the kids who are edgy on twitter today might go in to politics or hold some other high level position. I don't think the current climate is going to cool down anytime soon, but maybe something l…

I suspect that as a larger and larger percent of the population has a cringey internet past to look back on, the power of old tweets will fade somewhat. It'll take a while though, and of course depends on how vile the past actions are.

Re: Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets

#37

Post by paxys »

It's weird to see the backlash against this when people here are the first to speak out about the need to preserve the internet. Like it or not, Tweets are part of the historical record, and I welcome this move.

Re: Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets

#38

Post by wmichelin »

tw04 wrote: post #35
nanna wrote: post #2

Honestly, I wish tweets were treated like verbal exchanges more than written. Not everything that is said needs to be recorded for perpetuity. If a politician or someone powerful tweets, then sure it might be in someone's interest to record it. Good luck to them. But unless you're someone that people really care about - it should be fine to just delete your tweet for good. If that means something problematic was twee…

But they aren't and won't ever be, and people should stop treating them like they are. It's no different than going to your local public square full of 200 people holding camcorders, and making a bunch of stupid statements. Did we all do stupid stuff when we were younger: absolutely. Would I want the entire world to see what I did as a teenager and judge me for it? Absolutely not. Which is EXACTLY why I personally th…

This is why Snapchat became popular, and everyone seems to have forgotten the value in that feature-set. Instagram blatantly cloned half of the Snapchat feature-set and Snapchat itself has also gone to shit.

Re: Archive Team: A Smattering of Tweets

#39

Post by coldpie »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #26
mdoms wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an incredibly toxic way to think about conversation.

Thinking before I speak and having consideration for how my words might be interpreted in the future is "toxic"? Words you say to others have consequences. It makes sense to take that into consideration. That seems pragmatic and polite to me.

The ability to broadcast some random thought you have to everyone on the planet, publicly archived and attached to your name, for all of eternity, is a new ability. We've never had it before, and we're discovering the consequences of that. I think it's reasonable to have some disagreement about how that ability should be handled without reducing that disagreement to whether or not words have consequences (obviously they do).
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