This post is about the “Beyond Privacy” Project: LIVING BETWEEN THE LINES information society through our personal information.
As this is an open work-in-progress book drafting project,
please do not hesitate to comment!
Every input is precious to help improve it.
Many probably have seen the Map of a Twitter status object below. Produced by Raffi Krikorian, from Twitter’s engineering department, this one-page chart quickly became popular. This was because it illustrated in a single image that a Twitter message was not a mere line of text up to 140 characters.
Although this document and its annotations are addressed primarily to API developers, it had a strong educational value. I have used it often. You had to see how wide the eyes of information law students opened in surprise and curiosity! That chart made easy to pass on the message we must do our homework when assessing informational practice. That we not be satisfied with only the visible information items and processes. That we must understand what actually happens in the black box. Even ask a hand to computer technologists.
I was writing a new book chapter entitled “Production Inputs“. It explains that handling of information objects allows us to produce new ones. However, this task requires, often without our realizing, the production of even further information objects, either to carry it out, or to describe it. The example of the 140 characters tweet which, in fact, features thousands of characters of code lines seems great to illustrate this point.
So I undertook to produce a new chart that would be updated, clearer as well as, more easily readable and understandable by non-specialists.
The result is this chart spreading over two pages. But it would have taken three to be exhaustive. Please, click the following to access :
- the single full size image;
- the 2 pages PDF document version; or
- the long description text of the image content (longdesc).
Among many things, this exercise revealed to me the existence of fields for blocking messages or entire users’ accounts at the request of public authorities, of holders copyright, or of others. It also revealed that this map is not only that of a tweet, but also of all the information items coproduced with it. To the extent that all these items are available in practice, the distinction is perhaps only one of nuance. From a pedagogical point of view however, this is worth mentioning.
Further revelation, I also found a few syntax, description and field’s status typos in the original chart from Krikorian. Far from being a Twitter engineer, I would be very grateful if you would signal to me any typo or error in the new chart proposed here.