There are two types* of people in this world: the first believes everyone’s lives are inherently interesting and the second is Nicholas Carr.
Yes, it is a terribly narcissistic mistake to believe that anyone gives a flying snake about what you ate for breakfast (it was Mintz Blintzs from Trader Joe’s and they were amazing, btw) or any other thing one ‘inanely’ utters. But that isn’t really the point.
In fact a ’stream of consciousness’, whether in the form of Tweets, posts, photos or any other artifact of our day to day life isn’t really for anyone to consume. Well, not in this era anyway. It’s more of a mark of our having been here. A legacy, if you will, of our lifetime. Something for our grandchildren to look back at and see how we lived.
I know I have quoted David Weinberger to death from the talk when he eloquently put it this way:
“We are recording our histories one blog post at a time.”
And then, mere hours ago via Twitter, the brilliant and talented Jennifer Myronuk (who is also a historical fanatic, which is where we became fast friends) tweeted:
“wondering how future historians will contextualize all of our digital musings. can only imagine future biographies with quoted twitters…”
And this is probably where I differ sharply from the Nick Carrs of the world. I don’t believe history should be written by a handful or curated by some sort of popular notion of ’success’ or ‘relevance’. I don’t find the breakfast of a teenage girl inane information to record publicly. I don’t find a tweet of general boredom or frustration a waste of time. I certainly don’t find opinions of any sort, informed or not unimportant to broadcast. Sure, right now they may seem like a helluvalotta noise to deal with, but as Ms. Myronuk alludes, historians will have a great deal of material to create a very rich context of our time.
The only pity is that we are still at the interstices of public/private where there are those who either don’t choose to add their experiences to the record or who don’t have the opportunity to.
My enormous interest in public documentation of streams of consciousness first came along when in the classroom of Dr. Eliane Silverman. Eli worked her whole life to investigate the historical anecdotes of women and published, amongst many other studies, a book about these stories in her chosen locality of the prairies of Canada. She stood in front of an auditorium of students and said (paraphrased):
For centuries, history has been recorded by the few of a few. We have lost many lifetimes of important stories, especially those of women. I bid that each and every one of you record your stories: your thoughts, your accomplishments (no matter how big or small), your dreams and your points of view and trust them to future generations.
I was so moved by Eli’s passion for this and agreed strongly. I knew that my late Oma had enjoyed many an adventure in her lifetime. Stories that I would often as a young girl roll my eyes at and complain, “I’ve heard this one.” All of a sudden, these stories seemed incredibly valuable. That very day, I sought out a recording journal called All About Me and presented it to her that evening. I explained to her that I would like her to fill it out as much as possible. She also revealed to me that she had 80 years worth of diaries, most of them in Dutch. My mom and I keep these safe to this day.
Shortly after Eli’s talk, I read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, a classic text that put out an early call for women to have the room to grow professionally. One of the chapters in that text described an example of what Eli was asking us to avoid, Shakespeare’s Sister:
That, more or less, is how the story would run, I think, if a woman in Shakespeare’s day had had Shakespeare’s genius…it is unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare’s day should have had Shakespeare’s genius…Yet genius of a sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among the working classes…When…one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.
Of course, Woolf was a horrid classist, denying that genius could be found in the working class, but you get my drift. Many stories have been lost over the centuries because of assumptions, narrow ideals of what ‘genius’ is, and the very fact that ‘genius’, a relative term defined by a few, is the yard stick for recorded history.
But today more people than ever are able to be publishers. Because of the internet. Publishing platforms. Various crazy tools that make it easier and easier for those of us who have anything to say (worthy of reading or not in whichever opinion exists). And we write and photograph and video and podcast and create gobs of content that historians can look back at someday and glean various threads of existence. Memes. A rich tapestry of lives.
Not that boring, monolithic mass of hegemonic crap that we think is history. Why do you think we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again? It’s not merely because people are historically myopic, it’s because historical evidence as it is presented is full of holes, missing experience, context and depth. It doesn’t connect with us.
No, Twitter isn’t some big savior of history or some comparison to the brilliance of historical figures like Woolf, it is merely a tool (140 characters at a time tool). The amazing thing about Twitter is that it has a great, low barrier to publishing for me and many others. The printing press was a tool that started to democratize the publishing of information and the internet made this even more possible. Blog tools, video & photo sharing, and whatever is coming in the future are very important factors in the richness of the recorded history. (interesting to note, though, that Ev Williams has been involved in many of these platforms…it would be interesting to hear if he has any personal stake or passion about democratizing historical recording).
I mean, really, the only truly certainty we have is death, right? Morbid thought, but currently accurate (personally, if given the choice to live forever, I’d decline). With you will die your consciousness…unless you record it and pass it along. And, hell, maybe nobody will ever give a flying snake whether you’ve done that or not, but I’m venturing a guess that someone (even if it’s only one person…your great great great grandchild) will. Personally, I was and still am extremely hungry to get to know more details about my Oma’s existence. Some of her diary entries are so vague. Some talk of meals. I take those snippets and her photographs, etc. and string together an imagined picture. The more information I have, the closer I am to an accurate picture and that is incredibly important to me.
It’s a pity we get so caught up in our immediate desire for fame and ego boosting that we don’t realize that, in the long run, we are collectively contributing towards a much better future. Instead of duking it out for the top of the pops, we need to concentrate on building more attention tools to start to understand our world better. It’s not about you or me. It’s about us and them.
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*Actually, there are billions of ‘types’ of people, but I couldn’t resist. 
19 Comments
Don’t let negativity get you down. Twitter is just a simple tool for doing something useful. Some people like to be negative about everything because it’s a sure-fire way to get attention.
Last week wikipedia, this week twitter… Also, you are very lucky to have such a large volume of journals from your grandmother, that is quite a treasure!
no actually you are correct there are 2 type of peeps !! Those who get it and those who don’t .. !!
It would be very interesting to see what kind of assumptions historians draw from our self-published media vs mass-media. Giving individuals a voice changes a lot of things.
Example:
If historians only had access to mass-media, they would think that the Boston authorities brilliantly foiled a major terrorist attack on 1/31/07. With self-published media, historians will be able to see that it was actually a massive overreaction to a few LED signs.
It just makes me thing about how many false historical accounts are likely floating around in history books.
“Sure, right now they may seem like a helluvalotta noise to deal with, but as Ms. Myronuk alludes, historians will have a great deal of material to create a very rich context of our time.”
I cannot fathom the engineering that will be required to:
* separate signal from noise
* reconstruct the missing context
So many tweets make absolutely no sense without context… it’s arbitrary data and some information (depending on what you can cram into the restricted character set AND how one tweet relates to the previous tweets), but it’s not knowledge and certainly not wisdom. It will be a big set of material, but I wouldn’t be quick to call it rich, and I certainly wouldn’t call it context.
As for lowering the barrier to publishing, I feel like we’re devaluing the word publishing… not that people aren’t already making that claim about blogs, but we all drawn our line somewhere, and mine is drawn between blogs and tweets ; )
Brilliant posting, Tara. I keep a journal of my own on paper, just like your Oma did. With no children, however, I fear that no one will ever care what I had to say.
Hey Kathy,
Well, as a trained sociological researcher (it was one of my gigs during my honours thesis), I disagree.
Sure, tweets alone are also missing context, but tweets combined with photos combined with podcasts combined with blogposts combined with offline artifacts combined with popular culture, etc. will tell a really rich story. And yes, it will be much more arduous to get through this level of information, but the end result will be a much more complex viewpoint of this time in history than previous generations.
As for devaluing publishing, many have made the same argument against any form of publishing that doesn’t have an official gatekeeper (i.e. putting up a website). It’s an odd struggle that the gatekeepers are losing. It’s inevitable whether they like it or not.
Personally, I think the power of the future will be in the curating of this user generated content.
I know, isn’t it lucky! I still want to, someday, write the entire story from her notes.
Hey Tara,
I haven’t chimed in before but this topic has, as you might well imagine, generated a lot of talk around the old Tassimo over the last few days.
It seems to me that if we’re going to analyze various forms of communication we really have to consider the signal to noise ratio of each and map that into some sort of continuum.
At one end of this continuum we can place communications that have been carefully researched, thought about, outlined, reviewed, drafted, re-drafted, edited, and revised. Things like good fiction or poetry, masters or doctorate papers, technical books, or important public presentations come to mind. In these cases, a small group of people (often a group of one), is spending hundreds of hours refining their thoughts, so that many people can receive cogent knowledge and wisdom.
On the other end of the spectrum you have forms of communication that are one-on-one, just-in-time kinds of interactions like a phone call, a chat, or an email. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the communications at this end of the spectrum, but they tend to have very low signal to noise ratios, especially in the context of the general public. I have to say that, IMHO, twitter falls cleanly into that latter end of the spectrum.
I mean no offense, but it seems to me that to try to place twitter content at the poetry end of the spectrum does a huge disservice to everyone who spends hours of precious time crafting their communications. Perhaps one person in a million is capable of spontaneous, verbal riffs of the quality that Robin Williams can pull off, but frankly, most of us just aren’t that good. (And in fairness, Robin undoubtedly spent years refining his craft, so that he could be so “spontaneous”.)
Do twitter fans who want to evelate twitter content to a higher plane really imagine that their spontaneous musings are worthy of a place in posterity?
Thanks for listening!
Bert
“it will be much more arduous to get through this level of information, but the end result will be a much more complex viewpoint of this time in history than previous generations.”
OK, agreed. (although I’m not sure complex==accurate…)
I’m just questioning whether anyone will be willing to do what’s necessary to somehow put all that together in a meaningful way (other than a particular subset of marketers or anyone tracking us *today* for less-than-ideal reasons).
But yes, assuming all that you suggest does happen, I agree it would be a more complex representation of our lives than anything we’ve ever had before, and (assuming that engineering and motivation to do it miracle occurs ; ) it could be fascinating and meaningful.
I think what we have here is a high art/low art discussion.
But I’m not really trying to define twitter or any other stuff that is available for personal publishing as art…just as historical artifacts, which are quite different from art.
Blogging, twittering, photo and video sharing, etc. are the cave paintings of our time. Not the Picasso’s or the Virginia Woolf’s…I was merely comparing Woolf’s argument for a room of one’s own to today’s publishing tools of ones own.
Fascinating point of view.
One concern (even assuming that filtering will be possible) is whether most of the information that is being published will be available in 10, 100 or 1000 years (who is doing with user-generated/published content what deja used to do with usenet).
Mario, that is the most crucial question of all. I saw Clay Shirky once speak about how we have paper artifacts (as well as cave drawings, etc.) from centuries gone by, but documents recorded on out of date laptops disappear daily.
Truly, is our content going to be preserved? Thank goodness for the Way Back Machine…It gives both an argument for and against people owning their own data.
“But I’m not really trying to define twitter or any other stuff that is available for personal publishing as art…just as historical artifacts, which are quite different from art.”
It was easy for me to be distracted by the Shakespeare, Woolf, Bronte, Austin references. But “just as historical artifacts”, this makes a lot more sense. ; )
Both Nick and Tara are right … and so is Kathy.
1) In the vast majority of cases, tweets and twitters and blog posts and Flickr photos will mean nothing to almost everyone.
2) Which doesn’t mean they’re not worthwhile … to people who know the “authors,” to relatives, and to friends.
3) And also doesn’t mean they’re not worthwhile to the people who are doing the tweetering. “I wuz here” may be inane, but it is meaningful to the person who wrote it (and the rest of us who deeply reflect on the existential angst embedded in that deeply felt sentiment when we come across it in the subway tunnel or online forum).
4) And which also doesn’t mean that some of the tweets, twitters, and blog posts will not become incredibly relevant as people who are ego-blasting their personalities out into the world become whatever they’re going to be … and future Mandelas and Hitlers and Hemingways and Picassos are studied by historians who have access to their juvenilia.
. . .
. . .
The challenge, as Kathy indicates, will be the signal vs noise issues.
Tara, really interesting that you picked VW as your image here. It raises another thought for me: “Does Twitter somewhat echo the stream of consciousness writing technique?” We know Woolf was the first woman to experiment successfully with this writing technique (Joyce et al. had already used it), which attempted to capture on the page the reality of our minds’ turbulent torrents of grand and inane thought. Isn’t this a bit like Twitter?? I agree with you - the tapestry analogy is the way I view it. Don’t look at the individual threads to derive meaning, but rather the message is in the broader image or pattern the threads suggest and create over time.
So, here’s a fun (and somewhat cheeky) question: “Would Mrs. Dalloway have used Twitter??” ha!
… Shazz
Shazz!
Thanks for this…I nearly forgot that about Woolf. (subconscious?)
Ha, me too! Until I saw this piece on Twitter beside her image I never made the connection. VW is a fave author for me - I once read a book about her that said she “revealed her characters from the inside out” … I agree that knowing the seemingly mundane innerworkings and behaviours of people over time really does reveal their true character.
Sounds to me like you’re trying to give greater validity to the use of Twitter than it’s fun or a way of friends to connect. I seriously doubt that anything of Twitter will live past the week, much less a year. As for your grandchildren? Why would they want to waste time reading tossed out blurbs, most of which record the minutia of day to day living?
For history? Thousands of letters were exchanged during the Civil War, the majority of which ended up in boxes in local museums. Why? Because the writing in most was so trivial and so centered around the individual’s life, that they’re basically worthless as historical records.
The most people can absorb as time passes is a summary of each time. Do we really place the fact that Laughing Squid had coffee in the morning into such a summary? Or do we make room for the works of Ada Louise Huxtable and Coetzee?
I’ve been publishing online for 12 years now, and I don’t think I’ve written anything, yet, that really warrants life five minutes after I die.
If you all get some satisfaction, or fulfill a need by being connected via this device, by all means — twitter away. But don’t delude yourselves that what you’re doing is painting a picture of this time for the future.
Re the future history of Twitterisms….imho you don’t have to go too far back, just say the 60’s - look at the “pop” music / literature/ art / fashions/ etc of the time and what has made it through till now. Or even the erudite volumes of the early alt.net.
Going further back and looking at the lessons of archaeology - few nuggets will survive, most will be lost in the digital kitchen middens of our civilisation.
Twitter as a technology is interesting. The content is mostly mental bubblegum
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[...] In Defense of Twitter: Tweets as historical artifacts: …Why do you think we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again? It’s not merely because people are historically myopic, it’s because historical evidence as it is presented is full of holes, missing experience, context and depth. … it is merely a tool (140 characters at a time tool). The amazing thing about Twitter is that it has a great, low barrier to publishing for me and many others. The printing press was a tool that started to democratize the publishing of information and the internet made this even more possible. [...]
[...] Source: Tara Hunt - Horsepigcow [...]
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