it's all Caxton's fault milud
in January of this year, I wrote the post call for global digital data amnesty which aimed to restructure how THE DIGITAL WORLD deals with our online ramblings.Back then I had 'no real answers'. Perhaps now I do. Let's see...
What the general public, that's you and I, understand about the commercial term PUBLISHING big p.u.b.l.i.s.h.i.n.g. is: a traditional (mostly print) media where great amounts of Publishing Companies' effort was put into:
fact checking
copyrighted material
correct formatting
paid-for articles/books
commercial distribution
financial benefit
Publishing is a Business, where the aim is to make PROFIT.
Compare that with Tweeting (a sketch of 140 digital characters) which mostly come across as 'brain farts' such as "Right, taking dog for walk, be back in a bit."
Compare that with Facebook (a Big Gov spy network that tracks your 'connections' and could implicate you in terror activity should it choose) where the most someone does is recommend a movie or talk crack about some daft celebrity.
Compare that with Blogging (this thing you're reading here) which is generally a one-person operation where someone has issues with issues and vents their home-spun spleen.
The internet has become this living lifeform of people's brainfarts and opinions and garbage. Which is all fine, there's nothing more creative than a free platform (take youtube for example) but it becomes troublesome when corporate/legal interests start trying to claim that 'the internet is publishing' and you start to come under their radar. It's not publishing, it's commentary. How can one say that you'd copyright "I'm off to bed now" or "just seen a gold finch on my bedroom window" or "I hate my life" or "fuck off nigger/paki/chink/honky/arab/bitch/fatty/spaz" and all the other shit people blurt out 'in the heat of the moment'? Where is the money to be made in that? Where is the wish to retain all that wonderful commentary for later reference or incrimination?
When search engines 'look for stuff', they're trying to reinforce the Commercial remit of 'making money' for themselves and their 'search clients'. "Searching" is literally the only part of the Social Media equation that is 'commercial'. So, it's up to the search engines to reclassify how they 'remember' your potentially-drunk potentially-crying potentially-stupid off-the-cuff tweet or post or comment.
The innane, charmless, annoying stuff we blurt onto Social Media, is that PUBLISHING? And should brain-farters be restricted or punished by the Anal Publishing Laws that cover defamation of character, libel and copyright? Free Planet understands that there'll always be someone who needs to have access to all that stuff he thinks is important to him/her, but this doesn't mean the internet should hang like a Sword of Damocles above every person's twitching finger. People shouldn't be losing their jobs because they think their boss is a dick. People shouldn't be targeted by security forces for saying that they think their Queen is pointless. People shouldn't be hounded by the media for the hors contextual rubbish that spills out of their mouths.
Well, "I'm going to lay some pipe now," take that to court.