3 ms·

Accumulation of random social media posts is not a substitute for organized collection of information.

by wrp 3y ago

UncleMeat 3y ago
Eh. Historians live for this random shit. A huge amount of interesting stuff in the archive is just stuff. It wasn't created to be historical or documentarian. I imagine that historians hundreds of years from now will be happy to dig through mountains of these sorts of materials rather than focus on documents created to be historical.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  Is someone backing up social media posts ?? Won't they be just gone when the platform shuts down ?
  - zimpenfish 3y ago
    > Is someone backing up social media posts ?? I backup my Twitter timeline[1], Fediverse timeline and Instagram posts but I appreciate that's an infinitesimal drop in the ocean. [1] Also a whole bunch of other stuff like "favourites on twitter/instagram/flickr/etc" get IFTTT'd to Pinboard, Day One, Dropbox, Perkeep, etc.
  - UncleMeat 3y ago
    Archiving digital communications is an interesting problem. I'm sure that over time a very large amount of digital communications will be lost to time. But that's true for the archive already. The large majority of communications from 500 years ago are also lost to time, but we can still do history. We'll still be able to do history in 500 years even if only a small portion of Twitter ends up being archived.
- jl6 3y ago
  Historians have a reasonably good sense of the authenticity of "random physical shit" from 1923, in stark contrast to "random digital shit" from 2023. The digital chain of custody is super-weak, and everybody is far more media-savvy, self-aware, self-filtering, and self-promoting, which means social media doesn't give us the sense of everyday life that we might have got from, say, a postcard sent home from a WWI soldier.
  - UncleMeat 3y ago
    Only because they've developed techniques for reasoning about documents. That'll happen for other material too. No historian reads a letter from 1923 and forgets that it was written by a person who has opinions, biases, and narratives. My wife is a historian. A nontrivial amount of her work is reading about petty business squabbles from centuries past in various letters to state actors. Those letters contain narratives, biases, goals, and even just straight up lies. And dealing with this is a basic part of being a historian. A historian who reads a postcard from a WW1 soldier and determines that it is a transparant depiction of everyday life without further analysis is the sort of person I'd expect to never get a faculty position.

Accumulation of random social media posts is not a substitute for organized collection of information.

by wrp 3y ago

Accumulation of random social media posts is not a substitute for organized collection of information.

Eh. Historians live for this random shit. A huge amount of interesting stuff in the archive is just stuff. It wasn't created to be historical or documentarian. I imagine that historians hundreds of years from now will be happy to dig through mountains of these sorts of materials rather than focus on documents created to be historical.

BlueTemplar 3y ago
Is someone backing up social media posts ?? Won't they be just gone when the platform shuts down ?
- zimpenfish 3y ago
  > Is someone backing up social media posts ?? I backup my Twitter timeline[1], Fediverse timeline and Instagram posts but I appreciate that's an infinitesimal drop in the ocean. [1] Also a whole bunch of other stuff like "favourites on twitter/instagram/flickr/etc" get IFTTT'd to Pinboard, Day One, Dropbox, Perkeep, etc.
- UncleMeat 3y ago
  Archiving digital communications is an interesting problem. I'm sure that over time a very large amount of digital communications will be lost to time. But that's true for the archive already. The large majority of communications from 500 years ago are also lost to time, but we can still do history. We'll still be able to do history in 500 years even if only a small portion of Twitter ends up being archived.
jl6 3y ago
Historians have a reasonably good sense of the authenticity of "random physical shit" from 1923, in stark contrast to "random digital shit" from 2023. The digital chain of custody is super-weak, and everybody is far more media-savvy, self-aware, self-filtering, and self-promoting, which means social media doesn't give us the sense of everyday life that we might have got from, say, a postcard sent home from a WWI soldier.
- UncleMeat 3y ago
  Only because they've developed techniques for reasoning about documents. That'll happen for other material too. No historian reads a letter from 1923 and forgets that it was written by a person who has opinions, biases, and narratives. My wife is a historian. A nontrivial amount of her work is reading about petty business squabbles from centuries past in various letters to state actors. Those letters contain narratives, biases, goals, and even just straight up lies. And dealing with this is a basic part of being a historian. A historian who reads a postcard from a WW1 soldier and determines that it is a transparant depiction of everyday life without further analysis is the sort of person I'd expect to never get a faculty position.