Sunday 1 August 2010

The Article 29 Working Party’s Opinions: “tweeted”


I’ve been thinking about how I can help a friend write her book on data protection. I thought that I could do my bit by going through the first 100 opinions delivered by the Working Group, to see how I might consolidate their learned views into more manageable chunks. Some of it is pretty heavy going. A lot more of it is really heavy going. The rest isn’t that much fun, either.

And then, at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park today, I bought a brilliant book by Alexander Aciman & Emmett Rensin. It’s called “Twitterature”, and basically it’s 60 of the world’s greatest books, irreverently retold through twitter.

Each book is reworked into a series of just a few tweets – and each tweet is less than 140 characters.

Absolutely hilarious. [Warning: some of the stories, particularly the reworking of Lady Chatterly's Lover, are quite rude. But unless you are of delicate disposition, you should order your copy now.]

Returning home on the tube, it suddenly occurred to me that I could probably reduce the core bits of all these 100 Article 29 Working Party learned opinions to just one tweet, if I really put my mind to it.

So here goes:

BLAH BLAH blah blah
BLAH BLAH BLAH
BLAH BLAH
blah blah
BLAH

Please feel free to try and beat this tweet – reworking, say, just one of their Opinions, or the lot of them, all in one go!