Enter the Social Media Historian/Forensic Analyst
Opportunities can be lost in the flood. Social Media Historians [SMH] would be tasked with capturing and organizing a live feed using software tools that keep track of names, organizations, and keywords, and which make analytics more relevant through intuitive analysis. This is the human intelligence [HUMINT] component of social media management. It requires someone (or an effective team) to be passively engaged in channeling a company’s social media streams (withholding interaction with customers, or followers.) As organizations grow, or as entrepreneurs build a following with their innovation and relevance, they would gain a competitive advantage with SMH, who get to hack away at the missing information problem confronted by their employers as they transact regular business.
The task of social media historical analysis develops into a competitive tech job using evolving tools such as Gnip. SMH will actively manage growing, searchable databases for their respective employers, highlighting notable comments and trends, putting them into the broader context of what’s happening in the social media space; preparing regular overviews of public responses to marketing initiatives, or to help ‘take the temperature’ of the public, or customer base, at the time an idea is first developed, and periodically during its life cycle.
In an interview by Jason Steinhauer published by the Library of Congress, Kluge Fellow and Information Scientist Katrin Weller discusses the role of the Social Media Historian as an industry leader on the frontier where analytics, forensics and academia intersect:
'[S]ocial media are already being used as a new type of data source by contemporary scholars in various disciplines: political science, sociology, linguistics, communication science, geography, physics, computer science and many more. It is logical to assume that future historians will also look at these sources. '
With a solid framework for protecting individual privacy in place, the SMH will have the skills to retrace conversations, or establish timelines for activities that weren't historically significant at the time they occurred, but would have an impact decades, maybe even centuries later.
I would add to the mix a crowd-sourced public intelligence capability- a
potentially valuable law enforcement tool. In the minutes and hours
following the Boston Marathon bombing, thousands of people sleuthed
around social media, gathering crowd shots, adding to (and in some ways
convoluting) the official narrative of events, as they occurred. Take the famous photos of the guys in tan khakis, wearing backpacks, one with a Craft International cover - the men were soon identified not as potential hostile actors, but as members of the Massachusetts National Guard's Civil Support Team.
This was a detail that investigators at the time did not value, but the question in the public's mind demanded an answer. There was a tremendous amount of noise, and I can understand how it might make the jobs of forensic analysts more difficult in the short run. No doubt, there are, and will always be those within government who will discard this public output as superfluous, even distracting.
I think certain people in the forensics community who are a part of the government’s law enforcement and national security infrastructure might feel threatened by something they cannot control. But the effects of democratization on criminal investigation brought to bear by the power of social media should be embraced by government at all scales, for it should not be considered competition, but rather, a concurrent, redundant public service provided by the people en masse.
Such a public record keeps government honest about their own forensic practices, as it serves as a repository for highly granular intelligence material that is totally transparent, and allows for the public to answer its own questions, and eventually to come to its own conclusions about critical events, like mass shootings, or terrorist attacks. Imagine if the internet had been just five years more advanced on September 11th, 2001. The SMH, working privately, or for a 501(c)(3), would be adept in the emerging field of Social Media Forensics, and would carry out this role.
The Software Archaeologist Evolves/Data Preservation Services
With the critical mass of commercially available computing software, the last quarter century was built upon a rapidly evolving structure of technology that cast away tremendously useful tools for managing information as newer, more efficient processes emerged. Old hardware was upgraded to the limits of design, then replaced. But much of the software that made that hardware useful was discontinued, their developers no longer offering updates. How many businesses out there, or governments, which haven't made data management a fiscal priority, or which have made critical errors that delay or prevent an overhaul, find themselves with rapidly deteriorating systems, while still managing tremendously valuable data?
This problem was recently related to me by a colleague who is an associate conductor in a Southern California public school. He shared with me the extreme vulnerability of his music program's data security, due to just such a problem. All of the school's orchestral scores, reference material, exercises, are still being accessed and updated with ClarisWorks 4.0 on a single computer running a nearly obsolete operating system. Years of information are in danger of being lost. This is an example of the effects of the first digital dark age: thousands and thousands of terabytes of information poised to fall beyond reach for lack of a functional platform to access it. Google's Vint Cerf puts the problem in the proper perspective:
"If we're thinking 1,000 years, 3,000 years ahead in the future, we have to ask ourselves, how do we preserve all the bits that we need in order to correctly interpret the digital objects we create?"
To the extent that it is feasible, maintaining a library of functional hardware diminishes the need for software reengineering. Such a collection could serve as a vital commercial resource for companies and individuals. A counterpart of the Aviation Archaeologist in preserving 20th century industrial lore, the Commercial Software Archaeologist is a specialist who works at depths shallower than the deeper digs of early software archaeologists, most of whom curate hardware for purely historical purposes. Such a facility exists in the form of The Computer History Museum, an outpost of the Boston Museum of Science, located in Mountain View, CA. But the knowledge and capability for commercial digital data management requires greater breadth, and less depth as their museum counterparts, as we are only concerned with curating a library of obsolete commercial systems - not merely the historically significant prototype machines. The challenges of building that hardware library are immense, but such a collection need not necessarily be centrally located.
A collaborative effort could be commercialized by way of a membership-based association of curators [a potential member might only have one very specific artifact in his or her personal collection] who would, for a fee, provide some of the very specific data conversion services needed by so many people and institutions.
Rolled into the standard fee, a subsidy for the costs of digital storage media could be offered to individual customers by the entity, either corporate, or non-profit, thanks to its collective buying power.
The entrepreneurial success here lies in lowering the opportunity cost of digital preservation and systems transition services for businesses, and any other owner of intellectual property [virtually everyone] who is in need of reestablishing more permanent accessibility to their data. By making it cheaper, and less time intensive, the first providers to offer these 'boutique' services stand to earn the maximum in economic profits. As this service market becomes more monopolistically competitive, top providers will have an evolving portfolio, as data preservation projects on the older systems near completion. Shallower layers of computing technology artifacts will then require the same attention.
It is unclear whether the future market for these services will grow or shrink, since some new hardware is hitting the market which is not designed to be upgradable, even though, at the same time, it becomes more durable, and more scalable. An example of this is the 2016 Macbook Pro redesign. With components that are glued in place as opposed to affixed with screws, Apple's overhaul seems to be driven by aesthetics, and the result has 'sacrificed customizability, repairability, and upgradeability,' according to tech writer Jason Koebler. Despite the uncertainty of the volume of future digital preservation work, and the scope of the hardware library that such work will require, there is currently nowhere near the supply of data preservation services to meet demand. The time to get on board with this business model is now.
With the rise of the network economy of personal computing came an explosion in new programs which served commercial aims. To the extent that a hardware solution to data management doesn't suffice, new solutions are in development for curating the software landscape of the founding age of personal computing. One such tool on the horizon is called the 'digital vellum' which 'involves taking a snapshot of all the ways that a digital file can be opened, and storing it alongside the document itself,' writes The Independent's Andrew Griffin. The most well cultivated effort thus far is the Olive project, spearheaded by Carnegie Mellon Computer Science Professor M. Satyanarayanan. The Olive project objective is to 'freeze and precisely reproduce the execution state that produced this dynamic content,' according to Satya's broad description of his team's preservation efforts. Olive, and other digital vellum tools will be at the disposal of Commercial Software Archaeologists, whose data preservation services help keep the early digital fires burning.
#socialmediaanalytics #socialmediahistorian #socialmediaforensics #HUMINT #publicintelligence #softwarearchaeologist #commercialsoftware #datapreservationservices #digitaldarkage
Notes from the Author:
Some content was taken from the public domain, and in need of proper attribution. Please contact me if you wish to receive it.
I would appreciate comments and criticism, as this is an early draft of this article, and I plan for an eventual revision.
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