Blog Post About Nothing

So, I ran across this hypothetical Seinfeld scene mocking the twitter phenomenon, and couldn't resist turning it into a blog post. Basically, in the scene, Elaine and Jerry are giving George a hard time because he has become obsessed with tweeting and is engaging in said activity compulsively. George is staunchly defending his right to tweet (declaring "No one stops George Costanza from tweeting!") When Jerry points out that George, who has no job or girlfriend, does not in fact have anything of interest to tweet about, George emphatically asserts, "I got plenty to tweet about, baby!" After Kramer wanders in and mentions that he had a friend who tweeted himself to death, the scene ends with Jerry asking rhetorically whether typing in increments greater than 140 characters would break the internet.

The scene, though obviously farcical, illustrates several points relevant to the consideration of digital curation. First, it brings to mind the problem with noise potentially drowning out information of value. Digital publication is so cheap and easy that anyone, even a consummate loser like Costanza, can flood cyberspace with information about nothing. Because of the potential to lose relevant information in a sea of trivia, I think that it is extremely important that we emphasize the filter function involved in digital curation. For example, can any single scientist really humanly go through ALL data pertaining to a study? Particularly in fields like climatology it seems essential to perform some sort of data triage. (Many of those fields benefit from shared data, but usually also along the lines of collaborative efforts instead of straight data dumps.) It seems to me that digital curators could at least perform a cursory, primary triage of data.

A second point raised by the Seinfeld skit is that no matter how great and convenient we the information pros find new information technology, there will always be the likes of ludites, tenured liberal arts professors emeriti, and half-deranged hipsters who will hate, fear, or refuse to accept new technological methods. In expanding access via digital means, we must be careful not to limit access to other portions of the population, which may be more a problem of infrastructure than straight-up digital curation. At the very least, education programs in new i.t. methods seem necessary.

Finally, Jerry's joke about 141 characters breaking the internet drives home the fact that we really are dealing with new media. Twitter has changed the way people communicate by rigidly enforcing a strict brevity. This may change people's reading/learning habits. I'm not precisely suggesting we limit our descriptive elements to 140 characters per digital item, but it is something to keep in mind.

So, basically, the sketch brought to the surface of my mind some of the digital curation issues that have been spinning around in there such as filtering noise, adapting to new user habits, yada, yada, yada...