In an earlier post, I started to explore who is responsible for preserving our online conversations. Is it:

• The person who creates the discussion?
• The people who participate in it?
• Or, is it the entity that provides the means for these discussion to take place?

Now, I acknowledge that not every conversation can be preserved. If I go to the corner of Bay & King to hail a taxi, I’m not responsible for giving a word for word account of the conversation I had with the cabbie.

However, to discount informal conversations and not acknowledge it as a legitimate form of history is also not fair. For many cultures, they rely on storytelling to pass on their history from generation to generation. Many slaves throughout North America, the Caribbean and South American in the 18th & 19th century could not read or write. So, they passed on their history to each other through storytelling. Recipes, music, events were all shared through word of mouth.

For a long time, many historians discounted oral history as a legitimate form of history – unwritten stories. Yet, it is through these stories that many pass on important details about events, geneology and so on.

In our online conversations, we use chat rooms, discussion boards, blogs and podcasts to share information about ourselves, our lives and our thoughts. Although this space is informal, what’s being shared is a legitimate form of history and hence, becomes equally important to preserve this.

Just because someone has reached their bandwidth requirements or hasn’t logged into their account for months doesn’t mean that the entities that provide the space for these conversations to occur can now just delete that profile. The thoughts expressed by that person and the dialogue that took place will become important to future generations in understanding the way we thought, or acted or why all this Internet stuff has become so important to us.

Instead of focusing on who should be allowed to own the conversations that take place online, we should instead focus on who should be preserving these conversations and what responsiblity companies such as MySpace, YouTube, MSN, Google and others have in being the storehouses of cultural preservation. Million of people use these services hourly, therefore they have some sort of responsibility to archive users’ behaviour, actions and of course, conversations.

Some of you may say that privacy wins out and therefore, we will never be able to preserve these dialogues. However, many of these online entities have terms & conditions that clearly state that your activities are being monitored, so if we’re already being watched, why not go one step further and simply retain it as well?

At the end of the day, is it the person who creates the conversation responsible for preserving it online, or does that responsibility lie with the entity who provides the tools to enable these conversations? I feel it’s the latter.

Technorati Tags: history, Culture, technology, social media, Podcasting, Blogging, montreal shooting, Kimveer Gill

Update: There was a shooting at a Montreal college earlier this week. One dead, 20 wounded. The killer, Kimveer Gill, who shot himself after being confronted by police, was very active online. He shared his thoughts and his feelings on an online community called vampirefreaks.com and here’s his profile page (although you need to login to see it). I found his blog (although it’s difficult to follow) and a UK website printed an excerpt here.

The shooter did something horrible, but isn’t his thoughts worth perserving? One person – screename eversparkle – says no. In particular:

“I think now it’s time for vampirefreaks.com to remove all of his content. We’ll never be able to help everyone in the world who is f****** up, but we can at least get rid of this little bit of cyberspace that breeds such hatred and violence. Use it as a place to discuss anti-violence, gun control, and have healthy discussions about our so-called problems in life, and erase this asshole from memory.”

I disagree. His thoughts need to be preserved. Knowing his thoughts helps us to understand what to look out for in the future. This is all about preserving our collected history, no matter how bittersweet, horrible or disgusting it is. It’s through these stories that profilers can understand pyschopaths, that parents can understand their children, that police officers can understand serial killers. To remove Gill’s thoughts from the social media space just because he did something horrible means that we’re removing a bit of our history.