I love what Julia Baird brought up in her article in Newsweek “Our True, Tweeting Selves.” She brings up the point that people who think social networking is private is wrong. She is right. Twitter is a public domain unless you make your Tweets private and that still does not guarantee privacy if you’re invited followers decide to retweet you. I love her metaphor that she uses about Twitter and journalism–Tweets are the doodles in the margins.
Politics and junk, self-aggrandizement and social activism, the phony and the genuine, the mad and the sweet. This is the history we are hammering out, daily, in the online world that we consider ephemeral and intimate and yet that is rapidly becoming more concrete and public. Martha Anderson, head of digital archiving at the Library of Congress, told The American Prospect that her favorite tweet was “Regarding Library of Congress plan to archive tweets, if journalism is 1st draft of history, is #Twitter the doodles in the margins?
” Which is a great way to put it. Wouldn’t you love to be able to see doodles in the margins of the Constitution? Would we be shocked if we saw sketches of naked ladies? We shouldn’t be.
Twitter is definitely the doodles in the margins. People are being socially interactive and discussing tabu subjects such as politics and religion. So what if some of it is not politically correct, guess what, the Twitter community and beyond takes care of these situations. Should we lose jobs over it? I’m not sure because then you’re taking away the voice that we so long wanted with the media. But, we should not abuse the venue that allows us to have our say. Lets say we’re not as polished as the media conglomerates wish we could be. Am I condoning bad behavior–no, just pointing out that online communities usually take care of such unfair, rude, and dare I say ignorant communicators.
Don’t we all doodle in the margins while taking notes. I have scores of annotations in books and on articles that have my opinions doodled out to the side. I’m sure the author would not agree, or maybe the author would smile when I would put exclamation marks behind a great idea to put in a research paper. I think Tweets in the Library of Congress will create a great future history book. Remember how we learned about the London Fire? If it wasn’t for Samuel Pepys diary we would not have a deeper understanding of the 1700′s in London as we do. It’s as if I’m helping write history with what I thought was important at the time. For example, someone might find it interesting that I’m a scholar who wrote a dissertation titled “Blogs and Dialogism in the United States 2008 Presidential Campaign.” Or that in April 2010 I went to Memphis, TN for a conference. Or that I have a toy poodle named Lucy. Or that I tweet good articles like Baird’s to my friends.
Social media will help historians and the Library of Congress is really creating an important documentation of what life was like in 2010, and when the year 2500 or 3000 comes around people will look back and think wow, I’m glad they archived those archaic digital tweets. Then people in the future will speculate how we ever survived without X technology or X item. I just hope my doodling helps future generations understand more about life in 2010 and helps future scholars understand the significance and importance of Twitter and how such a communication tool still new to us opened endless communication boundaries beyond the one-way media we endured for the last 100 years.
