Kids, consent and privacy: #musesocial edition

I had an interesting conversation last week about the concerns of consent and privacy when using photographs of vulnerable populations on social media. A question came up about developing takedown policies for social content, which I hadn’t considered before. Some images of people that might be appropriate when put online might later become problematic for the person whose photo had been taken–for instance, if the person whose photograph was shared experienced changed circumstances and no longer wanted to be associated with or publicly represented by that period in their life.

While those ideas were still marinating, I saw a Tweet from Kate Carruthers linking to a piece on FastCompany by a 14 year old who quit Facebook after discovering that her mother and sister had been sharing social content about her for more than a decade of her life without her consent.

Then, several months ago, when I turned 13, my mom gave me the green light and I joined Twitter and Facebook. The first place I went, of course, was my mom’s profiles. That’s when I realized that while this might have been the first time I was allowed on social media, it was far from the first time my photos and stories had appeared online. When I saw the pictures that she had been posting on Facebook for years, I felt utterly embarrassed, and deeply betrayed.

There, for anyone to see on her public Facebook account, were all of the embarrassing moments from my childhood: The letter I wrote to the tooth fairy when I was five years old, pictures of me crying when I was a toddler, and even vacation pictures of me when I was 12 and 13 that I had no knowledge of. It seemed that my entire life was documented on her Facebook account, and for 13 years, I had no idea.

I could understand why my mother would post these things; to our extended family and her friends they were cute, funny moments. But to me they were mortifying. Scrolling through my sister’s tweets, I saw what my sister had been laughing about. She would frequently quote me and the random things I would say, it seemed anything I had ever said to her that she thought was funny was fair game. Things I had no idea she was posting online.

I had just turned 13, and I thought I was just beginning my public online life, when in fact there were hundreds of pictures and stories of me that, would live on the internet forever, whether I wanted it to be or not, and I didn’t have control over it. I was furious; I felt betrayed and lied to.

My husband and I have chosen not to put photos of our daughter online in large part because of these concerns around consent, privacy and representation. But I wonder now about museums and other institutions who use photographs of children and other vulnerable populations on their social media channels. How many institutions are thinking about or actively addressing the long-term footprint of their social media output? While there are often strong legal and ethical protections over the use of images of children, which require consent by a responsible adult, children themselves do not necessarily have the right or ability to consent to the use of their photographs. And although museums do not necessarily have the habit of putting images up that might seem embarrassing or problematic up, we are also not in the best place to define how someone else wants to be represented over the long term.

I asked this question in brief over the weekend, and got a few interesting responses, but I’d like to hear more about if and how institutions are thinking about this issue.

Something I’ve been wondering re: #musesocial, kids and privacy… does anyone have takedown policies for aging photos of kids on social who might not have been able to consent themselves when their photos were taken and (first) used and later wish to be represented differently? https://t.co/6v4Q7rnen8

— suse anderson (@shineslike) March 24, 2019

Or, is it appropriate for museums to leave social pics, esp of young people or members of vulnerable populations, up on social in perpetuity? Does anyone have an archiving strategy for social content?

— suse anderson (@shineslike) March 24, 2019

I think this is a thing many many marketing people don’t think about enough. We often prioritize getting a picture to best encourage promotion over ethical collection of images for promotion.

— Julia Kennedy (@JuliaKennedy_) March 24, 2019

Interesting question especially in terms of GDPR, In a collections perspective unpublishing might be relevant, though never deleting.

— Kajsa Hartig (@kajsahartig) March 24, 2019

Great Q!I wouldn’t say we have an implemented strategy or take things down but after about 5 years we don’t use marketing photos of children and take all brand new ones. Photos get dated, fashions change, cameras get better, and we don’t want to overuse our marketing pieces.

— Bethany Noel Nagle (@wagleface) March 24, 2019

Has your institution have conversations about this topic, or the circumstances of removing old images from social media? I imagine there might be other reasons for taking down old social pics images, such as those Bethany Noel Nagle mentions, but I’d like to hear if anyone has a clear strategy for unpublishing old social images.

What does your institution do? What do you think they should be doing?

Teaching After Tumblr, or “Post Teaching”

This is a post that has been sitting in my drafts for a few weeks, but Seb Chan’s newest post on teaching a class broadly titled “Museums and the Network: Caravaggio in the age of Dan Flavin lights” inspired me to pull it up, when he mentioned that the students in the course had used Tumblr as their collection management system and exhibition catalogue.

During the last semester, I taught into an art theory course at the University of Newcastle. The focus of the last lecture of the semester was on art and digital technology, and was intended to buttress right up against the present, so when writing the lecture, I decided to explore some of the ways that artists have been using social media as a space for art, like Twitter-based performance pieces, and The World’s First Tumblr Art Symposium.

The more I played around the ideas that were emerging, like ‘post-art’, or art that takes the form of posts, the more I wanted to get away from the usual Powerpoint presentation, so I decided I should match the concept and content of the lecture to its container, and use Tumblr as a presentation platform. Apart from the (not insignificant) downside that I needed to decide in advance exactly what order I wanted my posts to be in (the format being inflexible to last minute additions and changes), the platform seemed to provide an interesting way to create something visual with more possibility for interactivity. And it turns out that it was great.

Since the topic of this lecture was related to digital technology, every work of art or artist that I wanted to talk about was available in some way or some where online. Because of Tumblr’s format, it was easy to include quotes, images, video, links, and all within a single framework, without feeling a need to constrain the content to that framework or location. Rather than assigning specific readings, I was able to pull in images and quotes from the Web, and then push the students back out to the original context in which those works were found, in order that they could see them within context (particularly useful with pull-quotes from articles, or websites that artists had created).

What this made possible was deeper dives into content for students who chose to follow the links, in a way that might enable the students to get lost in discovery, which still having a central site to come back to afterwards. Using Tumblr in this way also seemed to create a useful contextual learning environment, into which external resources could be easily woven, whilst simultaneously maintaining the story arc of the lecture. It felt like the first time I’d given a presentation that fully interlaced the usefulness of the Internet in parallel with the live dynamics of lecturing.

Because this was a stand-alone lecture, I didn’t really exploit some of the platform’s other features, like the “Ask Me Anything” button, the opportunities for comments and questions, or the capacity to allow other people (the students, other teaching staff) to post to the site. However, I’d be interested in how these features could be exploited or played with over a longer time period. Could the “ask me anything” feature be used to encourage students to seek clarification about things they weren’t sure about? Might it be possible to ask students to seek out their own resources on a topic, and bring them back to the class to encourage conversations about different issues, and also about using online sources critically?

I could also imagine other benefits of taking to Tumblr for teaching an entire course, like the accumulation of a full semester’s worth of resources into a single location, which could help students understand the metanarrative for the course, as well as the individual subjects covered therein. In his post, Seb mentions the flexibility of Tumblr’s ‘archive’ view, which ‘provides a great way of visually browsing the objects and other media assets, whilst the standard view gives a more linear look’, and these two are features that could be useful for students seeking an overview of a subject covered in a lecture or across a whole course. By taking a ‘post’-based approach to teaching that cumulates in a single ‘document’ or site, it could be possible to create a significant single resource that tells the story of the course or lecture over an entire delivery period.

Ultimately, what I loved about this experiment was that it provided a way of integrating and weaving the web into the lecture, and it made possible new ways for creating an active and potentially conversational space for students to engage with the content of the lecture in a fairly direct way. Taking this approach immediately made me wonder about how museums could utilise a similar format of treating objects as posts in an exhibition context, giving every object its own post in a Tumblr-like site, which is exactly what Seb and Aaron’s students have done. Rad.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. What do you think about this approach? How else could we exploit the affordances of Tumblr (and platforms like it) for collections management, exhibition catalogues, or even teaching?

Declarative relationships, and the promise of social media interactions

A few months ago, I finally ‘Facebook friended’* someone with whom I’d been friends for some time. Writing on his wall in the days after, I made note of the fact that our friendship was now ‘real’ because it was publicly declared; a kind of symbolic nod to our relationship that was now visible to anyone who chose to look. The connection between us had become declared; an explicit rather than implicit thing. It sort of felt like the relationship counted a little more then, because it could be counted.

Now, I’m being marginally facetious with this notion that a Facebook relationship could matter more than one established outside or beyond social media, but not much. I’ve started to think often about the kind of identity performing that takes place on social media platforms, and how these kinds of declarative identity statements offer opportunities not just to take action or align yourself with an idea, but also to be seen doing so. Or, as Nathan Jurgenson writes, ‘Social media surely change identity performance. For one, it makes the process more explicit.’

In a 2008 paper on identity construction on Facebook, Zhao, Grasmuck, and Martin note that:

The construction of an identity is therefore a public process that involves both the ‘‘identity announcement” made by the individual claiming an identity and the ‘‘identity placement” made by others who endorse the claimed identity, and an identity is established when there is a ‘‘coincidence of placements and announcements” (Stone, 1981, p. 188).

There are so many avenues of communication available to us now, all with different levels of visibility and publicness, that the choice between making an action observable and public (say, openly Tweeting someone), or choosing instead to operate in a less visible backchannel (a DM, an email), is not just about task appropriateness, but often also involves the decision to perform an act of communication in public, or not; to make the discussion open or closed; to declare a relationship, or sentiment, or inclination in a way that can be seen by anyone, or to keep it hidden.

But the decision to make public an act of communication can also play a role in that endorsement or lackthereof of identity, too, because the other party to whom a communication is directed can then publicly respond, or appear to snub. In the third of our (awesome) Museopunks sessions at MCN2013 recently, Beck Tench makes the observation that with the capacity to measure interactions, ‘reputation is quanitifible, in a sense, and it’s also democractic.’ I’m not sure that I agree that reputation has become more democratic, because it is just as easy to visibly snub someone on social media as it is to talk to them in public. But this idea that we can measure or see relationships and identity performance is interesting to me, and does put a new emphasis on the declarative value of social media relationships. Maybe, counterintuitively, they really might be more important than meatspace relationships, for some things at least.

This has, I think, some interesting implications for us working in the museum sector, both as professionals, and in terms of dealing with our publics. The first is in terms of how we act as professionals, and how and where we choose to perform our professional identities using these kinds of public or semi-public platforms for connection; particularly if we consider how interactions with others can help embed or endorse that claimed professional identity, or otherwise. The declaration of being active on social media as a professional, too, now seems to have increasing impact on how one will be viewed professionally, but that definitely complicates notions of professional identity and the boundaries of work and ‘not work’ in a networked world. As danah boyd asked earlier this year, ‘what does labor mean in a digital ecosystem where sociality is monetized and personal and professional identities are blurred?’

But I also wonder about the declarative value of people ‘liking’ a museum on Facebook etc. In a lovely piece on Aeon Magazine recently, Patrick Stokes observed that ‘the online identity that most of us use is, to borrow a phrase from the American philosopher Stanley Cavell, our ‘next self’. Dress your avatar for the life you want, not the life you have.’ Similarly, in the aforementioned paper by Zhao, Grasmuck, and Martin, the academics considered how people act in nonymous, online environments and proposed that they have become a place where people tend to express their ‘hoped-for possible selves.’ In this light, the urge to ‘like’ a museum or any other group or activity on Facebook or a social networking site acts as a kind of ‘identity statement’, through which the individual can “stage a public display of their hoped-for possible selves that were unknown to others offline.” (Zhao et al. 1820)

I sometimes see people disparage the number of people who are actively ‘engaged with’ museum social media groups; that an institution’s page might have huge numbers of likes, but only a tiny proportion of those in interaction. Rob Landry, for instance, recently argued for museum websites as a space for connection, over and above social media, because the large numbers of likers don’t mean much:

With social media it’s easy to be deceived by large numbers that don’t mean a lot. For example, we spot checked the Facebook page of a major museum and found that they over the last several days they’ve had, on average, 716.4 likes, 184.8 shares and 8.4 comments per post. Looks pretty good, until you realize that they have nearly a million fans. In that context, 0.07% of fans liked posts, 0.018 fans shared and an infinitesimal 0.0000823% of fans commented, on average.

Here’s something to think about: would the fans who are engaging be the folks who would be buying tickets anyway even if Facebook had never been invented? And are you strengthening connections or just giving people who are already avid fans a nice way to interact?

But for me this ignores the value that comes from someone associating their ‘next self’ or the person they want to be (or want to be perceived to be) as someone who is connected to your museum. In the same MCN Museopunks session mentioned above, Nancy Proctor described a study that Silvia Filipini Fantoni did of Tate’s bookmarking system (I think this one), in which people were sent an email record of their visit to the museum to extend the visit, and even though many didn’t actually click on the links, they kept the email in their rainy day files. In this, Nancy saw a kind of promise to themselves that someday they would reconnect with the museum, even if they had not taken that action yet. And it’s here that I see something interesting in the notional promise of social media, and its declarative performance of identity, and museum audiences. Is there a gap between the people who like an institution on social media, and those who actually visit the institution? And if so, what lies between those two impulses; the association of someone’s ‘hoped-for possible self’, and their actual actions? (Has anyone studied this?)

I was thinking about all of this during MCN2013, when I finally emerged from the dark place of PhD-land, where social media contact is minimal, and re-entered the bright world of #musetech discussions online. I’m aware that this isn’t a wash-up report from MCN2013, but there are so many issues that I want to get into from this conference that I thought I’d dive straight into blogging the stuff that’s been on my mind lately. Meanwhile, if you are keen to find out more about the conference, you should check out these reports from my professional spirit animal Jeff Inscho and the ever-great Ed Rodley.

Of course, I’d love to know what you think. How do you decide which platform to communicate an idea, or connect with a person, when there are so many available now? And does the level of publicness or otherwise of those interactions weight into your decision? And do you think your digital version of self is accurate or aspirational?

*I love/am fascinated by this idea that friending is now a verb.

Process stories

In politics, the idea of a process story – the inside story about how policy is made – doesn’t always sit well. It’s “too inside baseball.” The focus on what is happening behind the scenes, on the machinations that impact policy outcomes is often perceived to be a distraction from the political outcomes themselves. But I’m a sucker for stories that unpack how something happens rather than simply focussing on the end result or product. I like knowing why particular choices were made and by whom; it helps me understand the flows of power and influence that shape the world.

This emphasis on process instead of only the final product is an idea that I can see in a few different places in our sector too, and I’m really excited by it. Dan Spock recently Tweeted a link to imPERFECT CITY – a fascinating sounding project from Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts (DCCA), which is “a conversation-based exhibition that evolves from an open call for proposals to conceptualize a utopian city within the DCCA’s gallery spaces.” Although the project has many layers and phases, what I am most interested in is the open processes the project purports to follow, which treats the creation of the exhibition as the exhibition. As the proposal by Maiza Hixson describes, “The exhibition “opens” during the planning phase to allow citizens to interface with DCCA curatorial staff who are present to answer questions visitors may have about curatorial process.” In other words, the exhibition is the process of the exhibition; it is not just the end result. imPERFECT CITY takes its form as a living process story. In addition, the whole project makes use of documentation (blogging, videos) as a means for exploring the issues raised by the exhibition, and creating parallel digital and in-gallery experiences.

I love this. There is something really compelling about the humanness of process that is visible in this kind of approach. The edges of the exhibition become permeable and uncertain; it is impossible to know exactly when it starts or ends. How reminiscent is this of so many digital interactions, which are themselves endless and linked to so many other things? The Internet is perpetually unfinished. It is about process because it is itself a process rather than a product; a constantly-shifting performative environment which demands that those who want use it must interact with it in order to experience it. Unlike most museum exhibits, which have a definite and pre-determined start and end date and typically exist within strictly defined borders, the Internet does not privilege time and space in quite the same way. This gives us a lot of space for publicly exploring and explaining how we do what we do.

Social media and digital publishing platforms open up a lot of potential for institutions that want to create compelling content and stories about their exhibitions that aren’t so strictly bounded by the dates and spaces of the gallery. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia has made inroads in this area with their recent ePublication for Anish Kapoor, which was treated as a “living catalogue” and evolved over the course of the exhibition to include a Preview Edition, an Installation Edition, and a Reflection Edition. Rather than creating interpretive content prior to opening and never revisiting it, this catalogue continues to grow during and after the exhibition. The Installation Edition includes information about how one of the sculptures was installed in the space, opening up the mystery of the institution to the public and adding depth to the discussion about the exhibition.

The Dallas Museum of Art’s recently-announced plans for a conservation studio also offer an interesting take upon the emphasis of process in the physical space of the museum, since the studio will effectively turn conservation into an ongoing living exhibition. As Jerome Weeks describes:

[Director Max Anderson is] going to turn conservation into a public exhibit. Other museums hold the occasional tour through their work rooms. But this is different. Consistent with Anderson’s other efforts in making the DMA more accessible online, he will be, more or less, turning this internal museum function inside-out and putting a spotlight on it. Imagine a hedge fund putting the accountants on display.

Wild, right? There is a certain voyeuristic fascination we have with getting behind-the-scenes in someone’s life, in learning what goes on behind the closed doors. Opening up of parts of the institution to public view plays right into these feelings, and develops a very human understanding of what the institution does.

But this approach also shifts the focus away from the objects and exhibitions onto the human forces that impact them. Could this prove to be a distraction? This is how Australia political strategist Mark Textor describes the political process story:

One of the consequences of an increasingly expansive financial and political media field is the need for content to fill it. Some content is important. Most is borderline trivial, certainly irrelevant. But that has never discouraged the commentators. This search for content to feed the hungry commentariat has led to the rise and rise of the ”process story”. The ”process story” is about campaign mechanics, whether it be a political campaign or a big market offer, not about the issues of the campaign.

Could openly documenting the process of creating an exhibition or of an acquisition take the focus away from the exhibition itself? And is a focus on process worth the effort, or does it just promise to add to workloads whilst providing only trivial or irrelevant content? Would museum audiences be interested in gaining insight into what we do and why, or is this just be extra effort for little reward?

What do you think? Do process stories interest you? Could you see this kind of approach working in your institution?

Social obligation, crowdsourcing, and an experimental lecture

When I was asked to give a lecture on professional arts practice and technology at short notice a couple of weeks ago, I decided to use the opportunity to get a little experimental in my approach. This occurred in two ways. The first was that I reached out to my networks on Twitter, asked for your help here on the blog, and contacted a few specific individuals in the Australian arts community with whom I had a relationship, in order to seek ideas and content that I might not think of. The second was by playing with the lecture format itself in order to move out of transmission mode and take a more discursive approach.

So what worked and what didn’t? The crowdsourcing process was interesting. It yielded many useful responses and results which broadened my perspectives and highlighted issues relevant to the students that I probably wouldn’t have otherwise thought of, like Kim’s comment about the cross-over between marketing and IP. I was introduced to new artists too, and received links for useful resources which I was able to pass along to the students. So that was great.

Not all responses were equal, of course. Those links and connections that came from Twitter tended to be shallower and at times less useful than those I received from other sources. The most useful were, in general, those responses that came from people whose specific contributions I sought out. This aligns with what the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England found when they conducted their own remixing/crowdsourcing projects last year. In the first project they ran, which “consisted first in creating a novel piece of content, an image, to serve as a creative seed and then ask specific people, using plain old e-mail, to turn it into something else, i.e., to remix it,” worthwhile responses came from more than half their targetted crowd. A subsequent project was executed using a mailing list and Facebook group, but failed to attract participants and good responses. In this second project, the message was not personalised, and there were many strangers in the groups. From this, the Collective proposed that the factors of success for the first project were that it utilised “pre-existing personal relationships”, had “well-crafted, personalized tasks directed at specific individuals, compared to the diffusion of responsibilities”, and that these tasks were more detailed than the messages to the broader group. I think my experience reflects something similar.

But crowdsourcing my lecture also led to something of a social dilemma. In the odd case where I received results that were not useful in the context of this particular lecture could I ignore them, or did I owe those people who had contributed the respect of using their links or ideas regardless? The act of reaching out asking for help and receiving it, both from people I knew and from strangers, left me to confront questions around social obligation and reciprocity. It became apparent to me quite quickly that asking for help was not value-free. While it might be appropriate to simply thank someone who’d replied to my Tweeted call for help and fold their response into my written document for the students, doing the same with a longer response on the blog felt insufficient to acknowledge the time and effort that had gone into helping me out. I felt particularly obliged to make good use of the contributions that art writer Sharne Wolff, MCA Curatorial Assistant Kelly McDonald, artist and technoevangelist Fee Plumley, and artist and curator Todd Fuller gave, since I had sought them out in person. These invisible social elements of participation became apparent to me through this process in ways they hadn’t previously.

The variety of responses that I received from this approach was, in part, what led to the experiment with lecture delivery. With only an hour with all the students in a single room, it feel like I had too little time to cover a topic as massive as “art, technology, and professional practice” in any real depth, so I wanted to get the students thinking and talking about the pros and cons of being online as an artist, and the impact such choices could have on their careers. I started with ten minutes or so giving a general lay of the land about some ways that artists were using the Internet in their work and what some of the issues were, and then opened up the floor to conversation, maintaining faith that I would be able to live-mix in examples from the responses I’d received from the crowdsourcing experiment.

The approach seemed to work quite well in some ways, but not others. The discussion in the room was great, with many students contributing and almost all appearing to be engaged in it. We were able to cover some interesting theoretical ground, and I did have ready resources at my fingertips for most of the ideas that came up. However, while there were definitely some bright eyes and eager students – those excited to have technology on the agenda and to share their experiences with me and the class – many others seemed to lack confidence, both in regards to individual platforms like Twitter, and about digital experimentation itself, and I don’t know that my approach would have equipped them with many practical takeaways.

So would I take these approaches to either lecture delivery or lecture sourcing again? Delivery yes, but not on every topic. The approach seemed to work well for the particular subject, especially given the time restrictions, but I don’t think it would be appropriate in every situation. By opening up to a more dialogic teaching method probably also meant that it was close to impossible to have predictable outcomes, inviting the risk that important issues could be overlooked. So although it was effective for engagement, it wasn’t necessarily effective for all types of teaching or all subjects.

What about lecture crowd-sourcing? Honestly, I probably wouldn’t do it again, or not without more forethought about how to seek involvement, what sort of involvement to seek, and how to incorporate the responses that I received. I’d want to develop better feedback mechanisms or ways to acknowledge contributors because in some ways it felt like I was taking more from contributors than I could give back. Inviting participation can be great, but should ultimately benefit both parties, and I don’t think I thought enough about how it might benefit those who gave feedback.

Both parts of this experiment helped me better understand some of the complexities around participation; about the social obligations it engenders and the importance of designing such projects well in order to benefit all participants. Now that I’m on the other side of the experiment, the takeaways seem so obvious. But I suppose that is part of learning too, that it is often from doing that we gain insight.

I’d love to hear about your experiences with these sorts of projects. Have you encountered similar issues from those I came across? How have you dealt with the invisible social elements of participation?

And, of course, thank you to all those who did participate in my crowdsourcing experiment. It was appreciated.

Is social media writing the new first rough draft of history?

During recent weeks, I’ve felt somewhat suffocated by the media and social media coverage of events like Sandy Hook. I’m normally a news junkie, but lately I’m struggling to cope with the onslaught of information, of bitsy and incomplete pieces of coverage and comment across every platform I use. This is probably no great surprise – public interest in Newtown coverage exceeds all mass shootings since Columbine, so there has been a lot of it. But I think the mass of live-time comment like this has really brought home to me just how much open publishing platforms are really shifting the way we communicate about significant news events. After all, there is no mediation with social media.

Where once news organisations were where we first caught wind of the significant events of the day, it now seems that social media is where the new first rough draft of history is being written. When even the Israel Defense Forces first announce that they’ve just started a military campaign via Twitter, one starts to get the sense that this is where news takes place before it makes it into the capital ‘N’ news.

But the continuous news cycle, which simultaneously feeds into and on social media, does lead to mistakes being made; or as Mathew Ingram puts it, it’s not Twitter, this is just the way the news works now. (New research is looking into the possibility of utilising machine-learning to automatically assess the credibility of disaster-related Tweets). This isn’t a new problem. It’s just that, as Ingram writes,

In the past, this chaotic process of journalistic sausage-making was kept mostly hidden from TV viewers and newspaper readers. Inside the newsrooms at these outlets, reporters and editors were frantically trying to collect information from wire services and other sources, verifying it and checking it as best they could, and then producing a report at some later point.

Even with checking and verification, news filed within the first day of an event is often shown to be inaccurate 24 hours later, as this piece on how continuous access to rich digital news archives is presenting complexity shows. The Guardian’s Chris Elliott writes:

Readers have hitherto accepted that each edition of a newspaper is a snapshot of the available information at the time the newspaper went to press. For instance, estimates of casualties in a catastrophic event, or details about a suspect in a crime, may change as more information becomes available.

Where these early iterations of the story remain on the site, the Guardian has relied on the date stamp and time of posting to indicate that this was the state of knowledge at the time it went up on the site. Where we find a story was significantly inaccurate or misleading based on knowledge at the time of publication, we amend the article and publish a footnote to explain the change as well as a published correction.

The news archive is flattening out, and becoming super-available (paywalls notwithstanding). Indeed, with so much of the Guardian’s content accessed 48 hours after it was originally posted (nearly 40%), there is growing demand from some judges for news organisations to remove material from their online archives that could prove to be influential to jury members in criminal cases. But at least news organisations have some guidelines and mandate to publish corrections to their work when its found to be inaccurate. Social media users have no such mandate.

Live-time coverage that feeds on and draws from social media still needs the establishment of codes and conventions, perhaps like declaring what a reporter won’t report as well as what he/she will. As this 2011 discussion of the practices of news curator (yeah, I said it) Andy Carvin reports, “[t]here are few established rules or journalistic policies” for real-time, crowd-sourced approaches to news. Still, this social-media form of reporting and comment is adding a new layer of publication on all events of significance.

So what does all of this means for museums exactly? Well, maybe it doesn’t mean anything directly. But if social media is, indeed, where the new first rough draft of history is being written, and museums are heritage institutions, then we need to be paying attention and trying to make sense of how it could impact curatorial practices. Or research. Or history. Or everything about how we understand our world.

How do we – as institutions or society – deal with and make sense of this increasingly unsettled discourse, filled with so many more voices than were ever possible before? I don’t know that we are equipped to do so yet. How do we capture the ones that are, and will be, important (without buying Flickr and other sites)? We cannot simply hold onto the front page of the local or national newspaper and feel that the job is done. It cannot work like that.

I leave you with some thoughts from an interview with David Stout, domestic correspondent for the Continuous News Desk of the NYTimes (2008):

I think we are indeed writing the rough draft of history, although some drafts are rougher than others. I think writing history, as opposed to daily journalism, requires a certain distance in time and dispassionate reflection. It’s also, of course, far more detailed. For that reason, I have read a lot of history. It helps me to keep my perspective, and reminds me that many things run in cycles.

What do you think? Do you agree that social media and live-time reporting is becoming the new first rough draft of history? And if so, what does that mean?

writing about talking + talking about writing

I’ve been thinking about blogging and social media lately; about what it means to ‘grow up’ professionally in public, and about what the indiscriminate opportunity to publish – open to anyone, but grasped by relatively few – is doing to our professional dialogue. The longer I think about these issues, the less certain are my conclusions.

Andrew Sullivan, a veteran of the art form, writes of blogging this way:

This form of instant and global self-publishing, made possible by technology widely available only for the past decade or so, allows for no retroactive editing (apart from fixing minor typos or small glitches) and removes from the act of writing any considered or lengthy review. It is the spontaneous expression of instant thought—impermanent beyond even the ephemera of daily journalism. It is accountable in immediate and unavoidable ways to readers and other bloggers, and linked via hypertext to continuously multiplying references and sources. Unlike any single piece of print journalism, its borders are extremely porous and its truth inherently transitory. The consequences of this for the act of writing are still sinking in.

The consequences for museums, and museum professionals too, are also still uncertain. In his post, entitled Why I blog, Sullivan further proposes that “…the key to understanding a blog is to realize that it’s a broadcast, not a publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling, it sinks.” But if this is a broadcast medium, it lingers like a publication. What are the consequences of this for our profession, or for those individuals who choose to engage in this space regularly? Although there are some museum blogs that have been around for years, it is a form still in its nascency.

In November, I have two opportunities to reflect on these questions. The first is in a panel on blogging at MCN2012 with Ed Rodley, Eric Seigel and Mike Murawski, which will consider blogging from both a personal and institutional perspective. We’ll ask what it means “to learn in public, and be an active and consistently open communicator? Where does blogging fit into an institutional, professional and personal identity? How do you manage multiple online identities? How do you deal with the inevitable public criticism and negative reactions to your work? What impact has blogging made on your career and life more generally?”

I’m super eager to work through these questions with smarter and more experienced heads than mine, particularly at a conference like MCN. I loved MCN last year, and with the program for MCN2012 looking great, I cannot wait to head back to the USA. The conference is kicking off with an Ignite session to pop the mood into “stimulating” from the start. MCN2012 will also be a chance to catch up with so many museumers who challenge me, and to follow up in person with some of my favourite museumgeek guest bloggers like Janet Carding, Liz Neely and Matthew Israel. I’m feeling inspired already.

I will also be reflecting on social media as a disruptive force in museum discourse at INTERCOM2012 in Sydney. INTERCOM is ICOM’s International Committee for Management, which “focuses on ideas, issues and practices relating to the management of museums, within an international context.” The 2012 conference has #museumchallenges as its theme, which recalls Rob Stein’s discussions from 2011 (I wonder how the conversation will have altered in a year). The INTERCOM program looks great, and I’m looking forward to learning what museum directors and speakers from around the world see as being the greatest immediate and long-term challenges facing museums now (plus, Jasper will be here!). How different are the concerns of museum professionals in China, Finland or Colombia from my own? And what can we learn from their experiences?

No doubt I’ll pick up lots of new insights to share with those playing at home, too.

Are you attending MCN2012 or INTERCOM2012? Do you think that social media has impacted your work or profile as a museum professional? How do you feel about its influence on your own career, or the sector at large?

BTW – Mar Dixon is conducting her second annual survey on social media and the cultural sector. You should fill it out.