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For this blog post I chose to examine my Twitter archive, because I use Twitter a lot compared to my other social media sites and I thought examining my archive would be interesting at least.  I found it interesting that everything, EVERYTHING that I have posted since I got a Twitter in 2011 was there, I don’t know where else my tweets would have gone or why they would have magically disappeared but it was crazy to see that everything was still very easily accessible.  Something else that I found really interesting was that when I downloaded the archive I was able to not only see everything that I had posted, but I was also able to see the code.  As someone who has never worked with code before, seeing the code didn’t mean a lot to me because I could not read it, however I think that if I had been able to read it, it would have been very interesting to see how all the coding worked.  When it came to being surprised, I think that the biggest surprise came from reading some of my old tweets and trying to understand what was going on in my brain in 2012, like why I thought it was okay to tweet at members of One Direction.  I did not find anything that I found particularly surprising or startling as far as things that I didn’t want other people to see.  Mostly everything that I found was funny or embarrassing, I actually found it really funny and read many of my old tweets out loud to my roommates, however that being said, if there had been anything that had been something that I did not want people to see that would also be there in the open.  I was intrigued by the way the information was laid out, the tweets were categorized by months and looked somewhat like a bar graph with the the higher the bar reflecting how many tweets I wrote in that month.  I thought that it was interesting to see how the amount of tweets varied depending on each month.  While I thought this was an interesting lay out, there did not seem to be any sort of correlation or pattern that related the amount of tweets to what month or season it was or anything like that.  

When it comes to what this means for our “privacy” I think it just solidifies the idea that everything we post on the internet is there to stay.  I feel like this is something that most of if not all of us have come to terms with and understand, that being said it is still perplexing to me that when I’m 30 someone could still pull up my goofy tweets directed at One Direction.  I would say that this would make me think more thoroughly about what I post on the internet but based on the past, I really don’t have anything on my twitter that is anything more than embarrassing.  However, I do have a heightened sense of awareness of just how public everything really is.  This became prominent to me when it came to retweets and tweets that had other people tagged in them, I wondered how many things that I had said ended up on other people’s twitter archives, and how many times my name showed up on other peoples archives.  This reminded me of the article in the Guardian that we read about the NSA and how they can look at people three times removed, I wondered how this could apply to twitter and if things that were retweeted could count and how broad of a spectrum that could create.  This also reminded me of the Raley article when it came to the idea of subjecthood.  I wonder how accurately my tweets are a reflection of me as a person and how they add to the web version of me that computers can create.

I think that we should care about this information, because it proves how easy it can be to get information that one would not want everyone to have access to, I’m not sure if there is anything that we can do to combat this fact, I think all we can do is to be aware and make sure that what we post will not have long lasting detriments.