Category: February 2 Assignment

02/7/11

archiving history

History, this is something that allows us to re-live our past and never forget what has happend.  Today’s version of histroy is not the same as the past.  In the past there was no technology or electronic devices used to video tape history.  All the history we know of today is either by means of writing with feather and pen or by searching the earth’s crust for signs of life.  Now-a-days We have almost anything important that has happend on video.  It is not going to be hard for archeologists in the future to learn about our present history.  In fact the people of the future will be so ahead because they can viually see our history that it will help improve theirs.  I think archiving tweets is pointless and is definately a waste of space and paper.  The only positive that can come out of it is that it would give a few people jobs.

Regarding wikileaks.  I believe this was terrible for the country because not only was the U.S. Gov’ts secrets exposed, in the eyes of others it made the U.S.(usually known as a super power) look like a chicken that can’t control it’s eggs.  Things U.S. citizens had no busy knowing about were leaked and it could only cause damage to the country as opposed to people’s curiousity being pleasured

02/2/11

Cave Art, Papyrus, Paper, Books, Photography, Press, Television, Internet, Youtube, Twitter, WikiLeaks – one trend

From the historical point of view all the forms of new technology that help to pass on more information to the following generations are STRICTLY a positive thing. Just like the emergence of paper, then books and literature,  then photography, then press, then cinema, then television – each added a new crucial dimension of historical data  and helped us, posterior generation, to better understand and visualize our history.  Similarly the emergence of electronic databases, internet, twitter, wikileaks, youtube will help following generations to understand and assess their history and bear tremendous anthropological value.

So I think it is a very bright decision on the part of the US government to archive all public tweets. Likewise, the emergence of wikileaks is a good thing for us in the long run. All  the talks about privacy concerns are a natural reaction of humans to resist additional transparency,  which has always been the case.  And as always the pressure for more transparency will overcome the resistance, and will take its own, as it produces more understanding, more accountability, more integrity, more efficiency, more justice, more happiness for the mankind in the long run.

02/2/11

bang bang!

The evolution of the process in which we record history has been changing consistently throughout the centuries. As a society we have come from stone slabs to virtual systems that can practically think for themselves.  Historical evidence and events can now be stored faster, more organized and in an easily accessible manner.  New technology allows data basis to record information that without this technology would be impossible to even gather ( i.e. seismograms).  I think Luke makes a good  point “As anyone who’s done serious archival work before knows, you spend a whole lot of time digging through irrelevant material to find the gem that’ll be the center of your fourth chapter.”  I’m not even remotely sure how a twitter archive in the Library of Congress will help or even appeal to my future great grandchildren but hey, if we have the technology and space, why not?

WikeLeaks I feel is a very controversial way to obtain ‘evidence’ that you will later allow you to formulate your own opinion.  I do feel it is essential to the American people that they have a sense of comfort in having an outside source (that of besides government issued information) of documentation.  I also feel that it needs to be taken with a grain of salt.  K.C. Johnson states, “The WikiLeaks documents give at best an incomplete picture of recent U.S. foreign policy, and at worst will yield an inaccurate one.”  My only worries about this is that later historians will have flawed information, but then again history is always written by the victors.

02/2/11

Can History be Trusted?

History was written by people in power for all times, to see from a macroscopic perspective that things recorded in history are not necessarily to be the truth. Everything used to be written in paper and stored physically in library or some other places. There is no doubt that our history is selective. However for the last decades, due to the new technology, recording history seems to be easier than ever. All of news and posts can be archived electronically without limitations. This will give historians a way to archive a wider selection of current events and make a better vivid history. Billions of tweets will be archived at the Library of Congress, people’s random thoughts are now even in the history! For the most important part, if everything is archived through the internet, regulations can’t fully control what will be appear in the history. So now historians have all sources to create history which can be trusted!

Might not be too far form now, not only our tweets but everything we’ve done thought the internet will be archived. It is hard to imagine that our Facebook status, emails, and all our private information will someday be a part of history.  Historians can be overwhelmed by the humongous amount of information. And it rises another issue to historians, how to use these evidence? Are these all true?

02/2/11

How do you know me? Haha I follow you on Twitter

Technology is the dominating and yet damning factor in our time. It is responsible for our advancement as a civilization, the laid back lifestyle many lead and the primary source of information, whether that be for social or corporate matters. With this new technology comes new ways of gathering information on individuals. On twitter.com you may “follow” people of interest and stay up to date on their every typed out thought, regardless of the value of the information. The Library of Congress now records this information, and I think future historians may find both useful and useless information while studying these archives. For example any type of information, no matter how seemingly random, has a great deal of value under the right circumstances. Let’s say that 35 years from now a political science historian wants to search information on the issues of current times, they can view the recorded feed of a white house official and gather information. Let’s say a psychologist 35 years from now is studying relationships in the past, now that break up with your girlfriend is a primary source for their book. Information is always valuable if not now, then at some future point, even if at the time it seems to be a waste. If you think about it, Twitter is actually a time/date chronicled database of our thoughts, feelings, opinions and beliefs for the world to see. It is the digital file cabinet with “last name/ first name” that defines us.

In the case of WikiLeaks, information that was classified found its way out to the public, thus raising questions as to what we can actually believe that our government is feeding us. Examples given in the article reference the situation regarding, “the Gulf Arab states want forceful action against Iran”. While it has been a widely know thought, we have been told that the situation was more of an escalated dispute, with WikiLeaks, it’s confirmed that this situation is more of a harbinger of war type scenario. Future historians can review the way we, in the present time, react to learning about this information. They can then connect our thoughts, such as those posted on twitter, to how we may have actually reacted. Historians may also view the release of these documents as groundbreaking, and see the political aspect of how the government kept themselves together during these times.

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Technology is the dominating and yet damning factor in our time. It is responsible for our advancement as a civilization, the laid back lifestyle many lead and the primary source of information, whether that be for social or corporate matters. With this new technology comes new ways of gathering information on individuals. On twitter.com you may “follow” people of interest and stay up to date on their every typed out thought, regardless of the value of the information. The Library of Congress now records this information, and I think future historians may find both useful and useless information while studying these archives. For example any type of information, no matter how seemingly random, has a great deal of value under the right circumstances. Let’s say that 35 years from now a political science historian wants to search information on the issues of current times, they can view the recorded feed of a white house official and gather information. Let’s say a psychologist 35 years from now is studying relationships in the past, now that break up with your girlfriend is a primary source for their book. Information is always valuable if not now, then at some future point, even if at the time it seems to be a waste. If you think about it, Twitter is actually a time/date chronicled database of our thoughts, feelings, opinions and beliefs for the world to see. It is the digital file cabinet with “last name/ first name” that defines us.

In the case of Wikileaks, information that was classified found its way out to the public, thus raising questions as to what we can actually believe that our government is feeding us. Examples given in the article reference the situation regarding, “the Gulf Arab states want forceful action against Iran”. While it has been a widely know thought, we have been told that the situation was more of an escalted dispute, with wikileaks, it’s confirmed that this situation is more of a harbinger of war type scenario. Future historians can review the way we, in the present time, react to learning about this information. They can then connect our thoughts, such as those posted on twitter, to how we may have actually reacted. Historians may also view the release of these documents as groundbreaking, and see the political aspect of how the government kept themselves together during these times.

02/2/11

Your “NO PRIVACY” Afterlife

Back in the day, when there was no computer or any other technologies, historians had to collect the historic facts from the words of people or the heritage that has been preserved. Recently, the Library of Congress claims that they would “digitally archive every public tweet.”(Lauren) That means whatever you have post on Twitter, including pictures, videos, status, comments, will all be archived digitally in the Library of Congress. Like what Lauren mentions in his or her article “Archiving Tweets”, Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions. Now the future historians will not need to dig through textbooks, all they have to do is to look at what the Library of Congress have digitally archived.

In the future, due to our new technology, historians will probably just get the information from the Library of Congress, and see what us, this generations have done. It is very different from the past. I remember for Chinese history, historians usually have to walk door to door to interview people who have been through any historic events. But since now, the Library of Congress has declared to archive digitally every public tweet; it is easier for future historians to get the information.

However, is everything on the Twitter relevant and true? Not really, and people will have NO PRIVACY at all. K.C. Johnson asks the question “How does the United States Government store its secrets? In shoeboxes?” If everything we have done will be observed by the government, then what about the secrets of the government, who will know the inside stories?  Finally, not only that we do not have our own privacy, it is also irrelevant to collect facts from Twitter.

02/2/11

from the “deep” to “shallow”

The Library sees Twitter as a “technology change” in the way we communicate. Nowadays, technology as the primary productive force, advanced technology has brought many benefits to the people; the generation of Internet as well as a large scale to be used in human daily life, it greatly expanded the free space of activities and also brought more freedom and get rid of natural constraints. Online social networks such as Facebook, Aim, Msn, Twitter, and etc are currently very popular, however these modern platforms are supposed to provide services that bring people closer together but I believe it is actually doing the opposite due to how easily it is to utilize instant messaging services to chat instead of having a conversation face to face and sending an emoticon instead of a real smile or even a hug. I strongly believe that in-person experiences are far more memorable than anything a computer screen can deliver.  Nevertheless the emergence of the Internet does help expand the dimension of freedom of human behavior, developing human’s great potential; bring to mankind a far-reaching change.
I agree with some people that say this generation is doomed from the “deep” to “shallow” generation; this generation is the generation of the information revolution Oliver Twist; this generation is taking the last memory of life without the Internet generation.

02/2/11

Breaking Tweets: The New Media

We all have been historians in one way or another, researching data for a paper we need to write for history class, or any class for that matter. It was only just a decade ago when I had to go to a public library to look for old newpaper clippings. I remember vividly how I had to go to this one specific library that comprises Periodicals. Looking back at it now, I am very envious of future generations that could now gather much more information with just a few simple clicks.

There are no other time in the past where finding information would be as easy as today. Information travels as fast as a few seconds for your post to be updated on the web. The social media Twitter is the living proof to this testimony. In 2009, when Tiger Woods’ car crashed, the information was already being tweeted on Twitter for over 45 minutes before it even appeared on CNN or ESPN, which are consider the worldwide leaders in news in their respective fields. Twitter changes the way we live and how we access information. Twitter is only a valuable tool demonstrated by how the users chooses to ulitilize it.

Although there are a lot of debates on the issue about how the Library of Congress is archiving every public tweets, how the future historians choose to use these information determines the relevance and significance of this decision. I agreed that there are alot of irrelevant posts on twitter, but the value of this information as a whole is the challege that future historians face.

02/2/11

There is no “everyone” in PRIVACY, or is there?

We’ve come a long way from the strenuous and tedious handwritten recordings on paper. Entering the 21st century, the Internet era has completely taken over. The technology of computers and other electronics has not only become tools to enhance productivity but has become the way we live. People are constantly on the Internet looking for data, whether it is  information to help them on their project to even information on social networking sites to see what their friends new status is. Whatever it is you’re looking for, the Internet probably offers it. This is a huge step forward in information gathering. It helps not only everyday people but as well as historians whom are always sifting through loads of information. With that comes consequences as well. The access to information has become so easily attained that people have become reliant on technology and the Internet. People become mind boggled when something unexpected happens: like their phone running out of batteries. Also people do not appreciate the information attained when generations before people would die (exaggerated) for these information.

In addition, another issue rises. With sites like Twitter and Wikileaks being archived, people may feel that our privacy is taken away from us. Ultimately, that is the case. There really are no secrets on the Internet. Once it is posted on the Internet, there is no way of taking it back. With that, people need to start screening what they post if they don’t want their secrets being found. Nonetheless, the Internet still is a great aspect to our future.

02/2/11

tools for future

Since people invented computer, the speed of gathering information have go beyond people’s conceivability. It becomes easier for historians to gather information of historical evidence from internet and database than before. The article, Archiving Tweets by Lauren says that the library of congress digitally archive every public tweets. I think it is a good ways to historian search online. People may concern that is huge among of data need to process every day. However, it is not a problem because each piece of tweets can be valuable historical evidences for future. Therefore, Twitter leaves a valuable property for our future generation.
The other article is talking about Wiki Leak. Wiki Leaks dumps a lot of documents which have hidden by political interest. I personally believe that it is not right to hide things that happen around us. History is belong to human, so everyone should have right to know it. Wiki Leaks not only exposes historical documents to us, but also illuminate there are incalculable documents that we need to explore. As a result, Wiki Leaks can be alarm to prevent government hiding history.

02/2/11

Privacy….What Privacy?!

Uncle Sam must be out of his mind! He reads my emails, listens to my phone conversations and now he wants to record my Twitter post????

The government regulates almost every aspect of our lives in one way or another. Isn’t that enough? Twitter is a place where people vent, share useless information about everything and nothing, and what they are doing at the moment. Twitter for the most part is public and almost anyone can view a person’s tweet unless its private, which don’t happen often. Just cause one is willing to share a tweet like ” I am watching Zack and Cody !”  with the twitter world that does not mean they want a historian from the year 3000 reading it ! What happens on Twitter in 2011 stay on Twitter in 2011!

Technology keeps on developing and changing. This (forever being renewed) technology is providing evidence for future historians about our way of life during this present time in ways that we couldn’t even begin to imagine ten years ago. Its cool for current historians to find unique meaningful messages on walls of caves or tombs and other artifacts from centuries ago. Too bad for future historians it will be less cool because instead they will find an archive full of twitter messages stating what a person had for breakfast and “failed tomato sandwiches”. Thats not exactly the way I want the future to learn about the present.

TWEETS AS HISTORICAL EVIDENCE : FAIL !

Mind Your Business Uncle Sam !

02/2/11

Zeitgeist

At this fast pace of twenty first century, with the technology boom and the ubiquity of the internet, unprecedented paths have and are being trodden to sweep modern society by its feet.  Technology have changed the world  in almost every category in the past decades, from the way we  communicate to the way we commute. Nothing is bared, not even the way history is made and recorded!

Now a days one doesn’t have to raise a flag in revolution to make history, but just post a tweet on it and you might have millions on your side to join your cause! Also with the news of Library Congress’s decision to record every tweet made, it will provide historians another outlet to data mine for significant events to record it in their books  for our posterity. One might also be concerned about the privacy issue that the social media sites like Twitter might have, but it reminds me of a saying “If you want to keep a secret, you have to keep it from yourself”, I think its something we’ll just have to adjust to and be mindful of what we do online.

02/2/11

Hello Big Brother

Ever since the creation of technology, society has never looked back. We are so relient on techonological uses that society has all but lost the ability to think and function on our own.

Though it has been very helpful in our progression of life for it has given us the ability to “archive” our everyday lives. Cave walls, dirt, and maybe eventually even paper, is no longer needed to help document history. It is a great advancement and helpful to historians down the line who want to look back and be able to show history without having to dig through pounds of fragile artifacts.

In “Archiving  Tweets”  this sentence by Luke, “I believe (strongly) that control over the life of user-generated content should lie permanently with the user.”,is my thoughts exactly on the whole situation. I do not feel comfortable knowing that what I am writing on my personal blog is being archived in someone’s library. I am very big on being private. Its bad enough people have found ways to turn technology into ways to hack into the lives of others and destroy them but now we also have to worry about the government, historians, jobs, etc. To me there really is no “freedom of speech” so to say if we have to worry about when can I say what and who is watching and judging my thoughts.

Continue reading →

02/2/11

Historians are going to read our tweets? Seriously?

With the advent of a new technology as powerful and influential as the internet, many aspects of our lives will certainly change. In fact, many aspects of our social lives and daily routines have already changed by the rise of social network like Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace. As always, the government will take action in accordance to our new social behaviors. Out of the many possible changes that they might take, archiving Tweets in the library of congress was definitely beyond many people’s imagination.

Okay, we have many questions with regard to this act. What is the benefit of filing Tweets? What is the downside? And is it cost-efficient to store a constant growing data base for indefinitely long? Well, as a result of this act, a massive amount of data and opinions from our common citizens will become available to historians and statisticians. Historians will then be able generate opinions and reach conclusions from a huge number of primary sources. This archive of daily comments of our common citizens is definitely powerful, geographically widespread, diverse, and enormous. Since twitters do record all sorts of events, our future historians will have no trouble in obtaining information on the public’s reaction to any events and any changes, whether they’re political, social, or economical.

Unfortunately, we might have huge issues if the historians use such system. This huge archive will share some of the same problems as the article on Wikileak had mentioned. The first problem would be: can the archive represent the general opinion? Realistically speaking, we probably do not have an optimistic answer for this question. Reading tweets that are focused on a certain issue is equivalent to extracting a specific population of people out of the whole. Without a doubt, not all Americans tweet, and not all twitters are prone to tweet about certain topics because many will choose to stay silent. Moreover, even for those who have tweeted, they would had probably wrote about 1 sentence of random thought on the topic; they would probably not bother to write an essay to completely express their thoughts on the issue. Due to all the reasons above, taking account of the tweets on the internet would be equivalent to recording the one random thought of the people who tweet and decide to tweet. Under such conditions, our archive of tweets would provide questionable contents and inaccurate reflection of our society. Many people’s voice would not be heard, and for those that are heard, their opinions have a high chance of being incomplete, inaccurate, and thus insignificant.

As such, allowing future historians to write their papers based on this archive might not be a great thing for the sake of recording and educating the next generation. This change in history-recording may not be going to the right direction. And let’s not forget about the costs. Is it beneficial to keep an enormous and constantly growing database of selective and incomplete opinions? Well, there could be other uses for such database. If America were a totalitarian state, this archive could become a handy tool to blacklist the citizens with anti-government views.

02/2/11

We ARE The History!

Remember when you were a kid? You read all these exciting history stories and started wondering what it is like to have your name written in the history book. “I must be famous or do some big things” you told yourself. Not anymore! To be part of the history, all you need to do is to tweet.  It can be about anything: being late for work, getting a new TV, real-time road condition updates, or comments on political issues. The Library of Congress announced that they started a plan to archive all the public tweets, which counts in hundreds of millions a day. Your comments on a latest movie could live in the cyber world forever next door to Mr. Obama’s greeting to the American people.  Everyone is part of the history now, even though for most of us, our share is quite small.

In a democratic society, where the leaders are fairly elected by the people, what the ordinary people think is more important than some celebrities. Part of the reason why the history book is full of big names is that the historians don’t have the means to dig in collectively every little thing that ordinary people said, did in the past. Now they do. If I dare to let me imagination fly, I can see future historians figuring out the source of certain social problems based on all the tweets. They might conclude that the beginning of archiving the tweets is a shining start of new era. 

Don’t be too optimistic though. Privacy will always be a problem. Some people would welcome a way to opt out the chance of being part of the history.  Some others don’t even bother to tweet. Without further popularization, tweeter will be limited on its ability to draw the big picture.  Let’s just hope everybody like to tweet.

 

what if historical events had facebook statuses

02/1/11

Recording history digitally

Recording history has been easier than ever with the help of technology. Think of just a couple of decades ago when all the information was recorded in written documents. Tons of papers were used and kept from generation to generation. Like Luke says in his comment, “As anyone who’s done serious archival work before knows, you spend a whole lot of time digging through irrelevant material to find the gem that’ll be the center of your fourth chapter. But that gem only is a gem because of how you contextualize it and relate it to other bits of information you’ve gathered. “With the advances of technology, nowadays we can record all information in a disk, cd or just in the memory of our computer.  Our next generations don’t need to search through an encyclopedia to learn about us, they do not need to walk in to a library to research about which team won the superbowl in 2011 or the major political events around the world in 2010. They will just need to click to search the topic, and click again to sort through all the given information.

We are fully engaged with technology every day. We know what is going on with our friends’ life even though we have not seen or talked to them in years, we just need to check their facebook status. And it seems to be that all these social network information are being recorded and stored somewhere for good.

People will sure think of privacy matters, but regardless, we are making history every day, and history is not just a recollection of events in the past, we should learn from it for a better future in the same way our future generations should learn from us.

02/1/11

Being A Part of History?

Many technological advances have been made over many decades in which it have had impacted many people in both positive and negative ways. People over the years have been so engrossed with new technology that they’ve become so dependent on it. Many people no longer write letters or postcards because email took its place. Online social networking such as Facebook, Aim, Msn,Twitter etc are very popular, nowadays many people no longer mingle around in public areas to meet new people because doing it online is faster and convenient.

Future historians may look back into our emails, Facebook, Twitter, Myspace or any sort of technological database to gather any sort of information about our culture based on how we lived and thrived in society. Based on the article “Archiving Tweets”, the Congress is planning to keep track of peoples’ tweet regardless of whether the tweets are important or useless. This may also cause additional problems for those who have privacy concerns because not everyone is interested in advertising about themselves nor interested in reading about other peoples’ business. However this may help contribute to future historians’ research as evidence for our time period since everyone can leave a bit of history behind. I mean who doesn’t want to be a part of history?

Based on “WikiLeaks and the Historical Community” I find it very fascinating that Wikileaks contains such important guarded national data . Wikileaks would definitely be a great source of information for future historians because they would be able to learn, reveal and rediscover our history and continue building it.

02/1/11

Tweet into history

In the past couple of decades, the standar

ds of privacy has been on much of a decline for the most part. Few people in the 1980’s had cell phones, now people are “tweeting” and “facebooking” about their where-abouts, recent vacations, and even feelings. People are not realizing that everything published digitally is (or can be) easily archived. Besides for the fact that complete strangers are able to observe your every post, posting pictures and thoughts can always come back to be held against you in the future.

Wikileaks also for example. Although I am not entirely familiar with the site, thanks to recent new head linings, I am not surprised this website was shut down for posting confidential information. Everything can be traced back to its author and nothing can be hidden on the internet. As safe as we may think we are, we are not. We must think before posting anything as nothing goes unnoticed…

02/1/11

One day you may not have privacy

Since the internet technology was improving, most of the people shared their thought or information on xanga, blog, twitter such kind of network service. However, before you wrote something, had you ever imagined that everyone could see what you posted on your space? From March, 2006, all the tweets were stored at the Library of Congress, which means all the twitter users’ information was stored too. Wikileaks document dump does the same thing, but more than that. It exposed variety of unknown of different countries. For sure the governments don’t want Wikileaks keeps running, and the owner had a lot of troubles from them, but it provides historian some secret information and help them to analyze different events. Therefore, not only for now but future also, historian could easily find information by sitting in front of the computer instead of reading a whole bunch of books.

Undoubtedly archiving tweets and Wikileaks document dump help so much by gathering the information; nevertheless, some may ask what about their privacy? This is a serious issue because some don’t want everyone knows about them. Also is it necessary to archive all the tweets? I doubt because most of the thing people posted on twitter were just meaningless, such as “My cat just scratches me!!” Therefore, this issue should be concerned earnestly.

02/1/11

Benefit of Technology

          Technology can have many benefits to the historians, because it makes things simple and easy. Historians can easily find the information online; don’t need to read whole bunch of book to get the information. The link about the twitter is one of the examples that show the technology can make historian life easier, they can go to the account to research the people and have the information that their need, also in the article “ Wiki Leak and the historical community” Wiki Leak is other example show the technology is good for the historians. However, privacy is a big issue, if the historian can find out your information; someone can find out also, there have not privacy anymore. So it’s not necessary to write down all the information you have.