Re: Twitter use by elected officials

* Anne L. Washington wrote:
>The U.S. equivalent of the Hansard is the Congressional Record, if I 
>remember well. They are both official records of what is said on the 
>floors during legislative debate. A tweet is an interesting artifact but 
>not an official part of the debate. Should it or can it be regulated 
>differently?  I suppose it depends on what the situation is.

A possible development is that representatives in parliament actually
start to discuss some matter currently being debated in parliament on-
line instead of in parliament directly, in which case there would be
a de-facto versus de-jure situation whether that is "official". Here
in Germany interjections go into the official protocol; whether the
representative shouts it out alound or via some online service is not
all that different if you consider that some news organizations that
cover debates are experimenting with showing the video feed alongside
online discussions in a single interface on their web sites. For the
citizen watching, the online comment may actually be more real than
what is spoken out aloud, as that is often much harder to make out.

>Given the difficulty in establishing email as part of a legislative 
>archive, I imagine that establishing tweets is much further down the road 
>in terms of records management policy.

E-Mail would seem to be much more difficult as it is private, in the
immediate access control sense, by default, while this would primarily
concern communications that are public by default, I would think.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
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Received on Friday, 11 November 2011 23:12:24 UTC