With a chance of flurries
Doc Searls, with an assist from the Incredible String Band, comes up with a metaphor I must deal with:
For a long time I harbored a fantasy about writing a history of radio, titled “Snow on the Water.” Now I’m thinking that metaphor applies to social media as well. Rather than geology, it’s an ocean over which tweets fly and fall like flakes.
Blogging is geology. Its posts may be current and timely, but they accumulate like soil deposits. You can dig down through layers of time and find them. Each post has a “permalink”. What are links to tweets? Temp-o-links?
Especially in view of this startling revelation:
I’m still haunted by hearing that users get a maximum number Twitter postings (tweets) before the old ones scroll off. If true, it means Twitter is a whiteboard, made to be erased after awhile. The fact that few know what the deal is, exactly, also makes my point. Not many people expect anybody, including themselves, to revisit old tweets.
I have no idea what that number might be, either. Last night I went back through about 800 of my own tweets before realizing that geez, I just went back through 800 tweets. And I’m somewhat flummoxed by the fact that in seven weeks I have put up over a thousand examples of semi-effervescent evanescence, though I console myself with the thought that probably 30 percent of those were generated by WordTwit, which sends up a tweet (and a nice, short URL off this very domain) for every blog post.
Still, all the blog posts, the 6100-odd here in the WordPress database, the 7000 produced before that in Movable Type, and whatever was going on here before that, remain readable in the general sense. (Whether they’re readable in an aesthetic sense is yet to be determined.) And I suppose I could archive the Twitter stuff, were I so inclined, but I can’t think of any good reason to do so. Yet.
sya »
15 August 2009 · 12:43 am
I think the whiteboard analogy is really apt. When I had lived in a dorm, there were whiteboards affixed to everyone’s doors. You’d write what was on your mind (or the latest scribblings from P-chem) at the moment and anyone strolling down the hall could spent a little time amusing themselves on some college kids’ detritus. And once you fill up the whiteboard, you erase it and start all over again. So I have no problem having all my older tweets disappearing into the internet aether.
Francis W. Porretto »
15 August 2009 · 5:35 am
An ISB reference? Hm. The old bat might not be a completely intellectually constipated blockhead after all. Oh, by the way, I hear that the Emperor of China used to wear iron shoes with ease!
Dick Stanley »
15 August 2009 · 11:06 am
Eight hundred tweets? You have stamina. I lost interest after eight.
CGHill »
15 August 2009 · 11:10 am
I don’t think it’s stamina so much as it is the irresistible urge to throw in a comment now and then, something that’s been characteristic of me since Mrs Gault’s second-grade class.