I’ve been sorting through hundreds of books recently. Partly it’s an attempt to free up some space in the house, and partly it’s an acknowledgement that I no longer need to compulsively hoard every piece of media that comes my way. For almost three decades, I’ve combined the habits of an obsessive librarian and a paranoid squirrel in saving every books, film, record, videogame, comic book and piece of ephemera that has come my way, even if it wasn’t something I particularly liked. Collections were in alphabetical and chronological order, items were very rarely lent to anyone, and I never sold anything.

Now that has all changed. I very rarely buy magazines (perhaps 2-3 a year), physical music (a handful of cds each year), films (again, maybe a handful), and even my videogame purchases have become more limited. I’ve substituted RSS feeds, streaming audio and digital rental for many of these previous purchases, and indeed, some of the proceeds of selling my old books on Amazon will be used to finally purchase a wifi Kindle. And I’m slowly whittling down collections to consist of those physical items I’ll treasue, re-read, pass onto my son etc.

The books are a mixture of every part of my life – fiction, biographies, automotive books, academic books, and I’ve been re-reading quite a few which I haven’t seen in ten years. A large part of my degree concentrated on the history and consequences of the Vietnam War, and I’ve just finished re-reading

It’s a collection of excerpts from interviews with Vietnam War veterans, with little context and importantly, no moral judgement, which means it’s capable of being horrific, moving, depressing and inspiring – often in the space of a single page. I’d recommend it if you’re interested in military history, or if someone is thinking about joining the army after a diet of Hollywood and videogames.

But it also left me thinking about a couple of areas relevant to digital content and marketing:

The value of first-person communication:

There’s been a lot of discussion regarding eyewitness reports and social media – I’ve done enough of it myself during events such as the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, plane crashes, or earthquakes. But I’m not as sure there’s been a similar level of debate about the historical value of first person accounts, and ways to tie together the various digital outlets for an individual to give context (and whether that’s actually necessary or not). It might just be that I’ve not stumbled across enough historically-minded social media people, but one thing that does leap out at me is that for years historians have placed huge value on firsthand accounts of important events, and yet even now some people question the value of social media updates about the same level of topics.

We’ve seen libraries and archives start the process of digitising their collections, and beginning to open them up to the public, and the value that can then start being produced. We’ve also seen a noble archiving effort for the important digital websites by the Internet Archive. (Scarily, there’s actually a handful of pages archived from this site – first sentence of the earliest page saved? ‘I was wrong’, as well as the site which first employed me as a full time digital journalist, thanks to the good/bad judgement of one David Cushman)

There’s obviously the question of whether archives will exist for what is proprietary social media data on the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, etc. If the company goes under, if legal restrictions change, or if our opinions on privacy change, will there be any route to saving our digital lives, and if so, will there be any way to join up tweets about Mumbai with pictures on Flickr by the same individual, even after their not around to point out which username joins to which alternative.

The first social media war?

In many ways, the Vietnam War was credited with being the first true ‘media’ war in terms of coverage and the implications on political and military policy. And recent wars have involved various elements of social media and digital publishing coming to the forefront, whether it’s updates, insights, personal observations, or document leaks. And we’re constantly being informed that nations are now preparing for the threat of cyberwarfare, about 30 years after a Berkeley astronomer and computer enthusiast first discovered a KGB agent hacking into their computer system (It was actually down to a system accounting error of a few cents – I highly recommend Clifford Stoll’s own account of what followed: The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage