Public History and Social Media

With the emergence of social media, our concept of what is considered to be historical record must change with the times as well. Why would a blog post or digital article not provide as much relevance and history as a printed copy? What about an influential figure’s tweet? Or how about yourself? With the storage ability that we possess today (moving beyond terabytes to petabytes) it is easier to incorporate different mediums into historical records, including digitizing what has been written and new information being created. Twitter has been noted as a great example of historical presence, since the information that they provide is “short, well-structured, and mind-bogglingly numerous” (McGill, 2016). This can help in future research in developing relevancy and direction from professionals, and even uses that we don’t even foresee.

When it comes to social media, I have become more aware of keeping personal and professional accounts separate, and why not since most social media accounts are free to create and easy to manage. Facebook has a more personal feel while Twitter, WordPress, LinkedIn have a more professional presence and attitude. Connecting to different accounts allow products and ideas to grow and spread quickly, especially attaching hashtags to add a global presence to social media (if there becomes a method to categorize and understand different hashtags in context). Since the Library of Congress preserves a great number of tweets, any digitized product that may be tweeted will be preserved automatically, helping the digitization process. Social media helps spread ideas quickly, organically, and freely throughout the world, and allows contributions from different perspectives and ideas.

Advertisement