On Permanence and Volatility of Information
Most answers about this issue are not too much associated with social networks, so the data collected in this respect is not enough to make a definitive assessment here. It was a limitation of the questions and a flaw on the interview process. However, as social networks in nature are similar to the web in general, some points can be made from the interviews. Especially the professors understand that the permanence and volatility of this medium is in part expected, but at the same time they expressed that it says much about the information producer, its reputation and trustworthiness can be challenged in a negative way because of this. It is interesting to revisit the anecdote from the 7th participant presented on 4.3.1 about the possibility of Wikipedia taking the place of a national encyclopedia. If Wikipedia is bound to fulfill this very important role, its permanence has to be assessed, because after assuming this role, it is more important than ever that it could be where it is with the passing of time. As he put it:
I’m somewhat concerned that they [social networks] are taking on the role of the official information sources which in a sense demands a more permanent presence than this kind of cooperation really allows for, I mean, in a certain point the originators of Wikipedia may run out of money or loose interest and there is actually no warranty that this knowledge source will have the kind of permanent existence that its use calls for. If it will take the role of important sources like the national encyclopedia, you have to be sure that it would remain there in time. [Int. 7]
Going closer to the issue of permanence on social networks, for instance with Facebook, I can ask the following question: how can we find a status update of one friend that was posted one year ago? In Facebook we can spend hours browsing through just a few days of updates, clicking on the “older posts” link. The information can be there, but its permanence is dubious because it is not a successful system in managing the user content as a collection. The information doesn’t have other point of access for retrieval purposes, apart from the name of the user sharing it. In the case of Tumblr, it is not so bad, because its search engine can retrieve terms on a person’s Tumblr page, and the application allows users to insert tags to content and via the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), the user can implement a way to
browse through the page by clicking on tags. The negative aspect with Tumblr is that all reblogged content can be lost if the original post is taken down from the Internet. This happens most often with Youtube videos and pictures because the application allows copying link locations for the resources and they will be replicated on a Tumblr page. The application also allows the upload of various documents, this will allow the content more permanence, but citing the original resource will be up to the user. When reblogging is used in this platform, the system itself adds the source and other people who have rebblogged the same document before you did. Twitter is a different case, the search engine allows searching for text and the user can use “hashtags”, which allows tracking the tag in real time throughout the platform. There are also the trending topics, which allow checking the most used tags.