While designing course content recently, I’ve been looking at some of the implications of email and blogging. One thing that particularly strikes me is the lack of realisation among most people that what is written on-line is automatically archived long term, perhaps even permanently.
I’ve been posting to usenet news groups for nearly ten years now, and one of my initial concerns was the fact that my thoughts and ideas could appear on millions of screens around the world. Fortunately, that thought bothered me a lot, so I’ve always been very careful about re-reading, and always paused before hitting the send button.
What I didn’t really consider in the early days, though, was the fact that my words would not only be accessible around the planet, but also down through the years.
I used to spend a lot of time in poetry newsgroups, which tend not to have the hearts-and-flowers atmosphere one might at first expect. Good poets are skilled writers, the conversation threads are often ruthless, if not downright vicious, and it all ends up “in the archives”.
And, yes, essentially, the archives are there for all time. Even if someone exercises their right to delete an old post, the chances are that bits of it have been quoted elsewhere in the same thread, or ended up cached on some obscure foreign server and may surface again when least expected.
Early drafts of poems that were posted for critique and that have long since been abandoned may well have been saved off to complete strangers’ hard drives and may yet come back to haunt, as may the throwaway barbs posted on an off-topic political thread.
When I was a teenager, personal diaries were kept under lock and key, not flaunted in public. But now that young people grow up with social networking as a simple fact of life, there seems to be none of this desire for privacy. The chance to achieve planet-wide fame at the click of a button seems to over-ride any natural reserve.
Perhaps, though, given the automatic distribution and long-lasting archiving of internet activity, people should begin to be a little more wary. Indeed, so it would seem from Siobhain Butterworth’s comments in yesterday’s Guardian on the subject of “unpublishing“.
don't confuse the narrator 