Social Media and Historians

Do you consider any of these messages, posts, photos, or web pages historical, i.e. connected to a historical phenomenon? Argue why or why not you would consider this content historical and support your answers through web research on the background and/or authors of the content.

A Tweet (live URL here)

A Gif

A Facebook group

An Instagram account

A Wikipedia page

After having argued why or why not something should be considered historical, let’s examine what professional historians have to say on the subject.

Option 1

Read the following two articles written by professional historians who both focus on the importance of primary sources. Then jot down what arguments the authors present about what can be considered to be part of the “past”:

1. Suzannah Lipscomb, “How recent is History?”, Historytoday, 29 January, 2015 (770 words).
   Selected quote: “Historians of the page might want to learn from those of the screen”.

2. Ian Milligan, “Historians’ archival research looks quite different in the digital age”, The Conversation, 19 August, 2019 (1,100 words).
   Selected quote: “Today, hundreds of billions of websites preserved at the Internet Archive alone is more archival information than scholars have ever had access to”.

Option 2

Watch the two clips and read the two articles below. Then list what can be perceived as positive but also as potentially problematic aspects of historians engaging with social media.

Clips:

1. Journalist/writer John Birmingham on the website of the Born Digital program of the National and State Libraries of Australia (9 min). Selected quote: “All of that stuff, of which we don’t really think about, because it’s like the air around us, that’s HISTORY!”

2. Historian Rebecca Huntley on the website of the Born Digital program of the National and State Libraries of Australia (3.30 min). Selected quote: “Reflecting now on my life, and the documents in my life, a lot is not written down”.

Articles and blog posts:

1. Is Social Media Good for History?, History Today 70, no. 2, 2 February, 2020 (1,480 words). Selected quote: “In a Twitter thread last June, curator Sara Huws wrote of her concern that the histories she tweeted from a Welsh museum account got more attention if she implied they’d been suppressed”.

2. Caroline Muller and Frédéric Clavert, “Scholarly conversation on Twitter”, Acquis de conscience, 25 March, 2021 (4,237 words). In this blog post, the two authors reflect on the prejudices of historians against social media. Selected quote: “The social networking service Twitter suffers from a bad reputation in the academic world and, more broadly, among those who do not use it”.

Combining your own thoughts with those you have now seen from professional historians, write a short essay of about 500 words with your opinion on when an event, experience, or artifact becomes historical and what this means for the relationship between historians and social media. You may want to think of the introduction of previous popular media such as radio, the telephone, film, or television and what kind of sources they yielded.

University of Tartu. “How does the past become history?”. History on screen. Last accessed December 06, 2022. Website Link

Image credit: Portrait of Terentius Neo, ca. 20-30 CE, Naples National Archaeological Museum. Public domain image.

Watch this TEDx Talk by journalist and computer scientist Tom Standage (16 min), author of “Writing on the Wall”, a short history of information sharing. Standage defines social media as media exchanged between people along social connections and creating a distributed discussion or community. In his talk, he argues that a number of historical periods and events have the same type of communication structure as present-day social media. He goes so far as to regard the era of traditional analogue media - radio, television, and film - as an exception to the practice of passing on information at a low cost that can be modified from one peer to another. In his view, the twenty-first century is a “return” to the communication structures that were common before the technological innovations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In the table below, the key points of this oral presentation are listed. Your task is to check Standage’s claims about social media being the continuation of an old practice by complementing the table with the examples that he gives of social media in the past. Try to determine whether the features of the ancient social media that Standage discusses are similar or different to contemporary ones.

*This is a simplification of the technological processes involved in uploading and viewing a YouTube video. For more detailed information on these processes, check out this 2016 infographic from How It Works.

Read this concise history on the origins of social media, offered as part of an online course for bachelor students of marketing at Maryville University in St. Louis, Missouri (USA), and answer the following questions:

• What was the first form of social media, according to the definition of social media referred to in this article?
• According to the author, what have been the two major shifts with regard to users/audiences who engage with social media and the devices through which they communicate?

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Now read a different version of the history of social media, this time published on the platform History Cooperative by Matthew Jones on 16 June 2015 and answer the following question:

• Which two key elements are different in Jones’ interpretation of the phenomenon of social media compared to the one offered by Maryville University?

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We list below a number of social media platforms and we propose you conduct web research to gather information about some of their caracteristics. The aim of the assignment is to make you familiar with the various ways these platforms function. Some of them are popular worldwide, while others are known primarily in specific regions of the world - you might even catch several that are no longer active but this is also interesting to consider! The list we propose is not exhaustive and it is of course possible to include more platforms, following your interests; or you can even select a limited number from the list, we suggest however that you focus your work on no less than three platforms. You can also adjust the selected caracteristics to your own research interests. Do not be intimidated if during your research you need to make use of translation tools for languages that you don’t completely understand.

Try now to establish the profile of the services you selected according to the caracteristics we propose below. Please note that several options are possible for each caracteristic - for example, once you consider the device, most services are accessible from various types.

• Type of platform: Is it primarily used for blogging, discussing, sharing, connecting, crowdsourcing, etc.?
• Content type: What kind of content - news, opinions, photos, personal stories, messages, games, films, clips, hobbies, etc. - is produced on this platform?
• Closest similar set of practices in the analogue era: e.g., pub, letter, telegraph, cinema, photo album, etc.
• Target audience: Who is the primary target of this platform? Business, leisure, other?
• Device: What kind of device - computer, tablet, smartphone, etc. - do you need to access the social medium?
• Content moderation: Is what is posted by users monitored? If so, by whom and for what reason? If not, why not?
• Data privacy: What is the policy of the company that runs the platform about the users data? What happens to this data?
• Geographic basis: In what country is based the enterprise that runs the service?
• Areas served: Is the service available worldwide?
• Predominant geographic/cultural zones: Are there specific geographic and/or linguistic zones where the use of service is more popular?

Now you are going to focus on the companies behind a number of well-known social media platforms and the strategies and policies of these companies regarding their platforms. We propose a list of three companies below but you can continue working on the ones you already selected in the previous sub-assignment - in the latter case, you might already have obtained information on some of the points we propose you examine below.

• Type of platform: Blogging / discussing / sharing / connecting / crowdsourcing, etc.?
• Creators: Founder, founding date, name of company, Chief Executive Officer, location of headquarters.
• Business model: How do they generate income?
• Selling point: What makes them unique and attractive to use?
• Content moderation: Is what is posted by users monitored? If so, by whom and for what reason? If not, why not?
• Data privacy: What is the policy of the company that runs the platform about the users data? What happens to this data?

After having compared the different companies behind some of the world’s most well-known social media platforms, read this infographic post “How Social Sites Make Money” from CenturyLink as well as this 2018 article by Will Oremus in Slate “Are You Really the Product?”. After reading both articles, answer the following questions below in a short answer of approximately 500 words:

• What is the connection between personal data and income generation for social media platforms?
• What do you think about the ethics behind this connection?

One of the best ways to understand the impact and function of social media on our lives is to closely monitor your own use of it. For this assignment, you are expected to keep a log of your social media use for three consecutive days and then compare your own habits with those of three anonymous history students as well as with statistical data for your country of residence. Doing this can give you insights on how social media users create their digital footprint and leave traces that may one day be used as sources by historians.

1. Keep a log of your own social media use with the help of the schedule below.

1. After keeping your own log, open the link below to see the log of three anonymous history students and note what strikes you as similar and different in their habits from your own. cit

2. Lastly, compare your use of social media with that of your country of residence. Use slides 78-101 from this 2021 global report on the use of social media to look up your respective country. (“We Are Social’s Digital 2021” by Simon Kemp from we are social/Hootsuite). If you find more recent reports, you may want to use those. What can you say when comparing your social media habits with those of the students above and the global report? Write down some of your thoughts and findings in a short essay (max. 250 words).

Six Degrees: Current logo available in public domain. Image from Wikimedia Commons. Friendster: Former logo used from 2002-2009. Image from 1000 Logos.

In the history of social media, Six Degrees and Friendster, launched in 1997 and 2002 respectively, are two early initiatives, both of them now defunct. If these were telephone companies or daily newspapers from the early 1900s, you would probably start your research in company or government archives or in a librery. But who is responsible for preserving the content of web platforms that once were accessible worldwide and no longer exist? Hopefully there exists a nonprofit organization, the Internet Archive, dedicated to instructing robots to make daily snapshots of web content, store this material in a database and make it retrievable through a search interface. You are now going to conduct a historical inquiry into these two social media platforms by consulting the Internet Archive thanks to the Wayback Machine, its powerful search engine. For a more in-depth explanation, see our handout on how to search the Internet Archive.

• Put the url http://sixdegrees.com in the search box of the IA and search for snapshots made on 29 April 1999, such as this one. Please note that the url in question is still accessible in the web, however the website is no longer functional.

• Open up a new tab in your browser and access again the Wayback Machine. Now search for http://www.friendster.com and look for the snapshots made on 1 April 2004, such as this one.

• You now have two start pages with several links to other pages. Compare the two by reading the homepage, checking the links that still work, and looking up information in the sections “about us”, “about the company”, and/or “about the site”. These sections are often found in a small font at the very bottom of a page.

For both Six Degrees and Friendster, note down the information you can find about the following elements - for some of them you may have to conduct some research on the web.

• Creation: date, place, name of creator(s), name of company
• Objective
• Modalities of access
• Website design
• Target audience
• Users: maximum number of users, cultural
• Business model
• End of activity: date, reasons, evolution if any

The duty of a person or group to deposit a copy of a publication or of a government to deposit all its documents in a national library or archive is often called a “legal deposit”, although the exact term varies from country to country. Until the late XX^th century, this obligation principally applied to printed materials, only rarely considering audiovisual materials. With the advent of digital technology, most legislation was extended to digital documents. While this is fairly feasible with regard to static digital content, with the increasingly dynamic, interactive, and immediate character of social media data (not to mention the issue of copyright), cultural heritage institutions are faced with a new set of challenges.

Let us have a quick look at Twitter, that you can further explore below later. Please read the following two blog posts and note the arguments for and against the preservation of tweets:

• “How Tweet It Is!: Library Acquires Entire Twitter Archive” by Matt Raymond, Library of Congress Blog, 14.04.2010, https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/how-tweet-it-is-library-acquires-entire-twitter-archive

• “Update on the Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress” by Gayle Osterberg, Library of Congress Blog, 26.12.2017, https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2017/12/update-on-the-twitter-archive-at-the-library-of-congress-2

The first of these posts was published when the Library of Congress announced on 14 April 2010 on its website that it was going to preserve every tweet that had been created through Twitter (tip: we propose you do not miss to go through the first 30 comments below the post as well). The second was published seven years later and reports the evolution of the project.

• Read this article by Andrew McGill on how the Library of Congress (LOC) might have underestimated the problems that it would encounter in its project to archive every single Tweet ever published: “Can Twitter Fit Inside the Library of Congress?” by Andrew McGill, The Atlantic, 04.08.2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/can-twitter-fit-inside-the-library-of-congress/494339/.

• Next, have a closer look at the Twitter account of the President of the United States @POTUS45.

Screenshot of “President Trump 45 Archived (@POTUS45)” Twitter page taken on a desktop computer on 14 April 2021.

• Now try to answer the following questions in a short response of approximately 250 words.
  1. Has the Library of Congress indeed applied the criteria that they describe in their change of policy in December 2017?
  2. Does this mean that these archived tweets are accessible for research? Elaborate your answer with arguments.

Much attention has been given to what can be seen as an open approach of Twitter with regard to collecting tweets. But what about the many other social platforms? Do they offer the same possibilities? Read this paper by Helen Hockx-Yu about the difficulties of archiving social media data for cultural heritage institutions, presented at the international conference of the Federation of Libraries and Archives in 2014 in Lyon. After reading it, can you list three arguments for why archiving social media is problematic?

At the end of her paper, the author suggests alternative ways of preserving social media through key institutions that are held accountable. Now think of your daily use of social media and try to imagine the needs of a historian in the future to understand the lifestyle of young people between 2020 and 2025 (the years of Covid and its aftermath).

• What do you think should be preserved?
• In which way and by what means?
• What would motivate you to make this effort of preserving your private archive?
• What are your ideas about who owns the copyright to your work and how your privacy and that of your social circle should be dealt with?

Image credit: Kambree (@KamVTV) on Twitter

Article: “How social media spread a historical lie” by Jennifer Mendelsohn and Peter A. Shulman, 15 March 2018, The Washington Post. Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20180315150517/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/03/15/how-social-media-spread-a-historical-lie/. Last accessed 27 August 2021.

Please summarize the main arguments put forward in the article (no more than three).

Then try to explain how this example applies to one ore more ways in which social media are used as outlined in the introduction. You can do this by writing a short text (150 words max.) or by recording yourself or by exchanging with your classmates/colleagues.

Image credit: Barack Obama (@BarackObama) on Twitter

Article: “Historical Understanding in the Quantum Age” by Joshua Sternfeld, published 20 January 2014 and revised August 2014, Journal of Digital Humanities. Available at: http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/3-2/historical-understanding-in-the-quantum-age. Last accessed 27 August 2021.

Please summarize the main arguments put forward in the article (no more than three).

Then try to explain how this example applies to one ore more ways in which social media are used as outlined in the introduction. You can do this by writing a short text (150 words max.) or by recording yourself or by exchanging with your classmates/colleagues.

Image credit: Peter Arkle for the cover image of the 6 June 2018 article “Born Digital: How Social Media and Paperless Offices are Reshaping the University Archives” from the Princeton Alumni Weekly.

Article: “Born Digital: How Social Media and Paperless Offices are Reshaping the University Archives” by Brett Tomlinson, 6 June 2018, Princeton Alumni Weekly. Available at: https://paw.princeton.edu/article/born-digital-how-social-media-and-paperless-offices-are-reshaping-university-archives. Last accessed 27 August 2021.

Please summarize the main arguments put forward in the article (no more than three).

Then try to explain how this example applies to one ore more ways in which social media are used as outlined in the introduction. You can do this by writing a short text (150 words max.) or by recording yourself or by exchanging with your classmates/colleagues.

Image credit: Screenshot of the “digitalpast” project homepage taken on a desktop computer on 14 April 2021.

Web page: About page of the “digitalpast” project. Available at: https://digitalpast.de/als-der-krieg-nach-hause-kam/digitalpast-english. Last accessed 27 August 2021.

Please summarize the main arguments put forward in the article (no more than three).

Then try to explain how this example applies to one ore more ways in which social media are used as outlined in the introduction. You can do this by writing a short text (150 words max.) or by recording yourself or by exchanging with your classmates/colleagues.

Image credit: An early sketch of the ideas that would become Twitter. Published on Jack Dorsey’s Flickr account on 24 March 2006.

Read this interview in the Los Angeles Times with Jack Dorsey, one of the founders of Twitter, from 18 February 2009.

• What was the inspiration for Dorsey to create Twitter?
• How did he design a prototype for the application?
• Which feature of instant messaging was emulated for Twitter?

Image credit: The Lighthouse(@the_bercibot)

Go to the archived version of Twitter beginner’s guide and answer the following questions:

• What is a tweet?
• What is the length (the number of characters) of a tweet at present?
• Has it always been this length?
• Why is the number of characters of a tweet limited?
• How does the limitation of characters relate to the specificity of Twitter?

Image credit: Current Twitter logo respecting the Brand Guidelines. Taken from the Twitter Brand Toolkit.

In this section, we use both the live web and the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. For guidelines on how to use the latter resource see this teaching aid for the Wayback Machine. Those who already have an X account will first need to log out from their account to be able to complete this assignment.

Use the historic URL of the Twitter homepage in your navigator: http://www.twitter.com

• Does the page you reach still display elements of the “Twitter” brand?
• Based on the Wikipedia article about Twitter’s evolution, can you explain why?
• Go back to the page you reached when using the URL https://www.twitter.com/. What does the text say on the homepage? (If you have a user account, you will need to be logged out.)

Now go to https://x.com/. What happens? What does the page say about the brand switch from Twitter to X?

Open the following three hyperlinks to the Internet Archive. Each one of them provides an archived version of the Twitter homepage in different moments in 2006, 2009 and 2015. Then, copy the texts that are displayed on the homepage of Twitter and note some of the changes over the different years, if any.

• https://web.archive.org/web/20060930214639/https://twitter.com/
• https://web.archive.org/web/20090413225407/http://twitter.com/
• https://web.archive.org/web/20150319071319/https://twitter.com/

Image credit: Screenshot of selecting “reply” to an already posted Tweet taken on a desktop computer on 14 April 2021.

Go to this New York Times article by Mike Isaac. After reading it, try to answer the following questions:

• In what ways can you respond to a tweet?
• Can you “like” a tweet/post? Why would you?
• Can you mention a user in a tweet? Why?

Image credit: Jack Dorsey (@jack)

• Go to https://twitter.com/jack/status/20 and check the tweet you just accessed.

This is the first tweet ever published. It was posted by the creator of Twitter, Jack Dorsey. Unlike other old tweets, it is still online and readable on Twitter. Compare the tweet as it is on Twitter today to two earlier snapshots of the same tweet:

• https://web.archive.org/web/20081103142857/https://twitter.com/jack/status/20
• https://web.archive.org/web/20150321230408/https://twitter.com/jack/status/20

These two snapshots are versions of the tweet archived by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. The first one is the earliest capture of it. In comparison, Jack Dorsey’s tweet, now called a ‘post’, as it is currently displayed on X, is not an archived but a live version - this means that today’s X users can still interact with it even today. Try to figure out some of the difficulties that archivists might encounter when they archive social media by comparing those three versions of the same tweet/post in a short response.

boyd, danah m., and Nicole B. Ellison. “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13 (1), 2007: 210–230 DOI : https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00393.x

Burgess, Jean and Nancy K. Baym. Twitter: A Biography. New York : New York University Press, 2020

Muller, Caroline, and Frédéric Clavert. “Une informalité bien ordonnée ? La conversation académique sur Twitter”. Tracés 21, 2021 DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/traces.13238 This article is based on a blog post also available in English.

Zimmer, Michael. “The Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress : Challenges for information practice and information policy.” First Monday 20 (7), 21 juin 2015. Available at: http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5619.