Colloquy with this post.
The wayback machine
does not render me you
nor do your letters,
nor our photos,
nor the friends pictured within.
Sometimes here I trawl your name
and marvel at the lack of trace:
your quiet life so lively lived
but not for any virtual reach.
Not our friends pictured within,
nor their photos,
nor your letters
still can render me you.
We have no wayback machine.
DandyID
Blogger
Flickr
YouTube
Twitter
Vimeo
Twitpic
Tumblr
Linkedin
LiveJournal
Mobypicture
Facebook
Picasa
Google Profiles
Google Reader
Posterous
{ 19 comments… read them below or add one }
Lovely and touching, as per usual. You give someone a great excuse to write.
It make me wonder tangentially if you see your twitter feed as a wayback device. I notice the interface in that regard is very sparse – no timeline, just buttons for older/newer pages, and no obvious searching facility – but are there tools for doing that?
Giovanni’s last post was Live Bookmark loading…
The evolution of Twitter’s search function is a fascinating story in itself and those who use it more extensively than I do are probably better placed to comment on it. The search function is in effect a site-within-a-site: have a look at the advanced search page for an idea of the amount of detail possible.
But this is designed, so far as I can see, to facilitate searching the twitterings of others and the coveted “trending topics” (see below the search window here), rather than exploring one’s archives.
Despite the fact it’s referred to as “microblogging”, I’m fairly sure most twitterers don’t treat it as such. Even though I know the archive’s there and more-or-less accessible, I tend to forget what I’ve said fairly quickly. It takes others to point out the repetition (for example, Sarah‘s contention, which I can’t find using the search engine, that every time I twitter about marking, everyone should take a drink).
However, the number of tools that are now available to import daily or weekly tweets into one’s blog suggests at least some sense that it’s desirable to archive them conventionally. Interestingly, a lot of blog readers seem really to detest this kind of cross-pollination, both because they do and don’t use Twitter.
I’m interested in the self-conscious archiving of self that might be going on, as well as in the finished product, and you’re telling me there is not terribly much of the former. Regarding the latter, I reflect some time that my father left no written record other than the accounting he kept for his business and the crosswords magazines he filled out, and wonder how I would feel if he had been one of the twitter generation. Would it add to my record of him, would I go read the stuff, would I feel like I’m intruding in his past?
Giovanni’s last post was Live Bookmark loading…
I just came across this plugin which imports Twitter activity into one’s WordPress database, but hasn’t unfortunately kept up with the system upgrades so is now out of date. That’s the sort of thing I’d like to be able to do: auto-archive without having to display it on the main page.
I wonder if in future there will be different problems for our descendants (and especially the descendants of so-called digital natives), around something like sifting through the “noise” of hyper-detailed record-keeping: multiple tweets, multiple blog posts, a constant spattering of graffiti through which any inquiry might well need to cut a swathe.
At least we’re trained to do that work, insofar as it’s no different to what scholars are having/have had to do with our literary figures and scientists and eminent historical figures. But multiplying this state of affair by how darn many we are has significant cultural implications, of course.
Giovanni’s last post was Live Bookmark loading…
Gee, my claim that Twitter has no obvious search feature was, help me find a word here… I’ll settle for “crap”.
Giovanni’s last post was Live Bookmark loading…
It took me ages to happen on it, most likely because the search link is in the page footer and the reader’s attention (if one is using Twitter from its webpage, as opposed to any number of other ways now available to read it) is generally directed at the top of the page. I also didn’t know, or at least didn’t pay any attention, to the hashtags/trending topics until I noticed @stephenfry widely using them about six weeks ago. Not long after, of course, they became important in the s92A protest (ie #blackout).
I’ve just added some Twitter-related plugins to this site; there is a certain amount of plugin-testing involved in this comment!
My judgement is still out on twitter. Mainly ebcause I have little to say. Nice to know it has some sort of search feature
Art and my Life’s last post was Small Wonders
I definitely use twitter for self conscious archiving of the ephemera of myself-but it’s not entirely satisfactory as I’ve been using it awhile- maybe since mid 2007- and a whole lot of the earlier stuff just disappeared.
FWIW blogging, as I do it, is also a form of self archiving my passing interests and thoughts. I had my first blog in 1999 and a Geocities homepage before that. I also have a password protected Diaryland diary that has been going since 1999 (about) which, like my earlier paper journals, is quite bleak and grueling to reread since I apparently only feel a need to update it when I’m upset, stressed or worried. I also started an archive of my lists of things to do on livejournal but I got bored of it. Bits and pieces of me are scattered everywhere electronically. I don’t really think they are of interest to anyone but me.
I actually wish I had devised a systematic way of archiving my lists of things to do some years ago. I half regret I threw out a whole lot of lists of things to do from my pregnancy awhile back. They were very evocative of that time and place in my life. I’ve kept the paper journals and the emails from when I got together with my husband, our “courtship” as it were and I may leave them to my daughter if it seems like she’d like them later on.
See, I like Twitter simply because I have less to say than I used to. I don’t need a search option on Twitter for the same reason I don’t need one of my blog – I’m not saying anything of great relevance. I use(d) my blog to tell stories I think are worth telling – so I’ll probably remember them – or to clear the noise in my head by writing it down and making it palatable – in which case I probably don’t need to remember every word… If I wanted to keep a diary of my day-to-day tedium for my own record (and I should – I have a memory like a… what are those things with bad memories? I can’t remember…) then I’ll keep one that other people aren’t subjected to. You all don’t deserve that.
There seem to be several categories of reasons at work here for why we do what we do: blogging/twittering as (momentary) self-expression, as personal or public record and as artefact. The latter drives me to import everything to one place (and back it up like crazy) as much as I can, but I can see the thinking behind a more diffuse approach too, much like my house is filled with stacks of paper of this or of that…
Jack brings up an excellent point – I wasn’t suggesting that Twitter or blogs weren’t first of all a means of communication with others, edited to the extent that each of us feels necessary and desirable, but rather asking to what extent people who use them might be conscious of the self-archival aspect. I don’t tweet and my blog is only occasionally autobiographical, so I don’t have a lot of personal experience to go by.
How do you back the material up, HB?
I should also warn prospective commenters that I’ll be using the material for my forthcoming book “Minding One’s Own F*%@ing Business in the Digital Age”.
Giovanni’s last post was Live Bookmark loading…
Wonder if it was sufficiently clear that the last bit was a joke at my own expense? I appear to be terminally nosey with people who use Twitter and other Web 2.0 tools when I could probably just go ahead and use them myself.
Giovanni’s last post was Live Bookmark loading…
There are two ways in which I back up: one is through the (occasional) use of the “export posts” feature with wordpress, which leaves me with an xml file of all my posts, which I’ve gradually imported here from various sources (my wordpress.com blog, livejournal, diaryland one and two and a defunct blogger and myspace blog).
The other is a wordpress plugin that backs up the database, which can also be done from the backend of my webhost.
I note also that a new plugin I’ve installed creates confusion in your fake book title
— all words that follow the @ symbol now link to a Twitter account, if available (as does anything following a hashtag).
Mmmhhh… had I known about the lack of a backupping plugin and the export feature, I would have chosen wordpress over blogger.
Giovanni’s last post was Live Bookmark feed has failed to load.
In Blogger, you can go to “settings” on your blog’s dashboard and select “export blog”. This should download it as an xml file. I don’t know if the backup plugin is included with wordpress-hosted blogs or just with the self-hosted blogs, as this one is.
Ah, yes, great! Where did this come from? I never recall I followed some googled threads earlier today that claimed there was no such facility except for a very dubious (and no longer documented in the help domentation) workaround. Ah, this is good news. Much thanks, oh blogmentor.
Giovanni’s last post was Live Bookmark feed has failed to load.
I don’t recall ever seeing it is what I meant to say in there.
Giovanni’s last post was Live Bookmark feed has failed to load.
Understood! You forget, I can read bafflement and allusion.
I have, very tentatively, set my twitter tools plugin to aggregate my tweets to this site weekly. I’ll edit how they look on the front page and switch off the aggregation if I don’t like it, but I am keen to archive them with all the rest of me. I wish there were a way of aggregating them into a post that goes straight to the archives.