September 27, 2013
Dear Everyone:
Time marches on… and technology gallops way ahead of it.
Some years ago, someone from the Public Affairs department called me
about Facebook. The company
had a Page and part of her job was answering questions that came up from
it.
Would those “conversations” be considered “records”?
Of course they’re records.
You’re interacting with the public.
Oh, crap. Now what do I do?
Good question.
At the time, I suggested copying the text and pasting it into a document
that could then be saved for the appropriate
retention period.
In the meantime, some enterprising soul has come up with a
software that will let you do that and more, just in time for the
lawsuits happily coming down the bunny trail.
Last night’s ARMA program was about
social media and how
records
managers are going to “manage” the content of same.
When you send a “Tweet”, do you know where those
“140-characters-or-less” reside?
Not on your computer, tablet or phone.
Ditto text messages.
Last year when a high school student, driving his daddy’s luxury
SUV too
fast, plowed into a family on bicycles, one of the first things the
police did was query his phone service provider to determine if he was
sending a text when the accident happened.
The presenter last night joked, “Not only you and the
NSA know
what you did on the phone.”
So does the phone company.
Ever send an angry text, then delete it?
Think it “went away”?
Think again. It’s sitting on
a server somewhere, just waiting for that
subpoena.
So the “rule of thumb” is the same as when email first came along:
Never put anything “in writing” that you wouldn’t mind seeing on
the front page of the Wall Street Journal.
As for “managing” all those “records”, the technology people think they
have a solution: Don’t call
them “records”, call them “information” (like that will keep you out of
court.) Instead of “records
managers”, they want to call us “information governance professionals”.
In other words, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and
quacks like a duck…
Have you tried shopping for a clock radio lately?
Probably not. For
those of you who are wondering what that is, it’s an
alarm clock that
turns the radio on at a preset time to help you wake up in the morning.
What’s an “alarm clock”?
Something people used before they had
cell phones.
When I mentioned the clock radio to last night’s presenter (before the
dinner got started), he held up his phone to illustrate that he a)
doesn’t wear a wristwatch and b) hasn’t used an alarm clock in years.
Now, you may be wondering why, since I’m retired, I would need a clock
radio to wake me up in the morning.
I don’t. “Jeannie”
does. And it has to have
dual alarms: One to wake her
up and another to wake her up again.
I did find a digital clock with dual alarms, but no radio.
We’ll have to see how that goes.
Otherwise, you have to buy an
iPod to plug into a device that
will turn the music on, provided you have installed music on the iPod
and things are getting too complicated…
Love, as always,
Pete
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