Social media: a global cultural heritage?

 In the late 1970's scholars from all over the world started to discuss what cultural heritage meant. Whilst this is still an ongoing debate, one of the key outcomes of the discussion däringa the 1970's was that archives to an extended degree became viewed as cultural heritage. This was largely due to whilst classical heritage, such as monuments and buildings, are themselves worth conservation, the archives can provide the context in which they were built. Without the archives, we would not have history but simply artefacts.

In Sweden the labeling of archives as part of the national cultural heritage became law in 2020. The governments proposition states that archives of public authorities are part of the national cultural heritage and therefore is under legal protection. In this regard it is however important to differ between public records (i.e. material coming the public sector) and general archival records that comes from a wide array of actors, perhaps most important political parties and civic society. 

One can call into question as to why it is only the states record that are seen as part of the cultural heritage, but this largely have to do with propietorship: the records belongs to the individual that creates them, and is therefore not state property. During the last years I have however come to think a lot about why social media should be seen as cultural heritage, and also why it should be protected by law or agreements. 

We are already talking about immaterial cultural heritage
(pictured spanish riding school). Maybe it's time for digital
immaterial cultural heritage.


Rather early in the internets history, scholars started to speak about online communities or virtual communities. What separated these communities was the fact that they were not physical, but consisted of people interacting online. Thereby, certain forums eventually developed their own cyber culture and their own symbols of meaning. With the launch of social media, this line however became blurred. Even though we have online personas, we also regularly interacts with people from real life in social media. Thereby we perhaps need to widen the scope, and start drawing distinctions between online communities and the social sphere that exists in the nexus between online and real life. 

Given this tremendous impact, we perhaps also should start to think on how to preserve the data stored on platforms such as Instagram and facebook. Given the unique positions this outlets have for people in their life, were they have integrated into a semi private sphere, it will probably be impossible for historians to understand the social history of 21th century without access to this data. Still, there today exists little to none legislation on how such platforms should be preserved, and that actually worries me quite a bit. Shall we save this part of our history for prosperity? This is a discussion that needs to be taken sooner later than later given both technological advances that render some data obsolete, and also given the private corporate sphere which comes with some risks regarding information management.

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