I am saying that technologies (email, Usenet, Web, usenet, Twitter, etc) may be used for both personal and work uses and policies, preferences, etc. need to recognise this. The dangerous, radical tools do get institutionalised eventually!

I think we are violently agreeing that not everything needs to be preserved

I wonder if you are conflating the personal/non-personal aspect with issues of officialdom and permanent record….

It’s clear that there are several axes to this – probably orthoganal!

However there may be reasons why you feel that you should do this. In a post in “Preservation Of Your Tweets I gave some examples of insitutional use of Twitter in which a tweet could be regarded as a formal record – and the recent heavy snow in Bath gave an example of this, will the announcement that the University was closed being made in a tweet (amongst other channels).

Another example of how Twitter is being used in non-personal contexts can be seen in the article on “U.S. District Judge Thomas J. Marten gets it. He’s the judge who has allowed a reporter to Twitter court proceedings in a trial of six Crips gang defendants taking place in his Wichita, Kan., courtroom.

Hmmm… I didn’t buy your déjà vu argument before, but now I’m not so sure

I don’t know that tweet preservation is something Im concerned about…. must we preserve everything?

I still feel that we (the community as a whole) has been here before in some sense. The launch of dejanews caused uproar from many quarters, because those who posted to Usenet also saw it as a transient medium. Although every site had different expiry times for news articles, there was an assumption that everyone threw away news eventually. It led to the creation of the X-No-Archive header, still honoured by google news. But that actually adds to, rather than subtracts from, the chaos, since archived conversations now often contain holes because some, but not all, participants don’t want their contributions to be kept.

Twitter has a long way to go before it is as chaotic, subject to such random abuse of quoting, and as generally flawed as usenet. But usenet still has its uses.

I’m still inclined to think anything online and public is fair game in the right circumstances, be it blog, website or tweet. We recognise the potential benefits and concomitant risks, and still decide to do it.

You and Owen compare it with reporting back of pub conversation – well, alas, that does happen sometimes. Luckily, if it’s a proper pub sesh, no one can remember a blind thing the next day: truly “ir-retrievable discourse”! In the case of Twitter, though, it’s not someone else doing the recording, it’s us ourselves – the danger is there (perhaps that’s the thrill?), of being hoist, Nixon-like, by our own self-inflicted petard of sousveillance.

Aren’t we (sub)consciously striving to keep a record anyway, or why would we Tweet? Sad, in some ways, that Twitter itself does expire. You won’t find anything about #jif08 on Twitter search now; luckily on Twemes.com, you can still find a record, including, for example, your doubts (which I shared) about the premise behind that lively but unenlightening debate on disruptive technologies: http://twemes.com/jif08?page=2 . Looking elsewhere on that page brings it all back! I wonder now whether Rachel was asserting her own view that “librarians are not literate in digital technologies and different media”, or merely reporting that assertion – and therefore, exactly what Owen was agreeing with….

It took me a while to fully appreciate Brian’s concerns about Tweet preservation, but that seems to me a good example: a record of something(s) that happened in our field, and what some people said or did at the time.

It exists, we can’t pretend it doesn’t. Now, what should we do with it?

Too many years ago I studied ‘discourse theory’ as part of my undergraduate degree – I think I many need to revisit this discipline for a framework to adequately describe these differences.

The expiry time idea is interesting…. but I think the Web would see this as a flaw and route around it. It could even provoke those who want to expose certain tweets more widely to post them ASAP/semi-automatically….