Social Media Apps as Archives: Capturing A Community’s Connections Outside of Time

In “Saving Private Reels: Archival Practices and Digital Memories (Formerly Known as Home Movie) in the Digital Age,” Susan Aasman defines cinema as “the perfect instrument for making a record of fleeting moments, of time itself” and describes the movement from the archive’s pre-modern concern with evidence to its post-modern concern with collective memory (245, 247). This new digital archive, with a “‘democratic’ spirit” that reveals the “inner life of people,” can be seen today in social media applications such as Instagram and Vine. Through these two specific applications, individual users can post short videos (as well as photos), typically taken on their smart phones, to their network of “followers” and any public audience that they may allow to view their content. Each clip is a ‘digital memory’—of a home-cooked dinner with friends, a drunk night at the club, a Sunday hike with the dog, grandma’s 75^th birthday party, an ephemeral sign seen on a morning commute, or the most recent snow bank formed silently overnight. As an aggregate, these Instagram and Vine accounts are “keeping a record of our lives,” individually and collectively (253). But as Aasman points out, it’s more complicated than the good old days of storing our memories as we would have in a printed photo album or a home movie tape. Purely digital, Instagram and Vine are “fluid archives” (255). They’re open (changing and accumulating constantly), communal and diverse (accessible to many users who can ‘connect’), self-referential (hashtags can be seen as “finding aid[s] in the documents themselves”), and allow for simultaneous collection and reflection  (photos and videos are capture, shared to networks, repopulated on other devices, and stored as data in the same two exchanges) (Ernst 84). As Aasman and Ernst both point out, these “archives” are not designed for long-term storage and memory, but for “immediate reproduction and recycling” (95). The structure and function of Instagram and Vine carry the added goal of communication. In fact, Instagram’s tagline is “Capture and Share the World’s Moments.”

When considering the traditional intention of archives to keep documents as “proof” of events, the temporality of applications such as Instagram and Vine become problematic. If collected documents are always being reproduced (posts can be “re-grammed” or “re-posted” days, months, even years later and show up in today’s “news feed”) and don’t have clear origins (posts do not need to be credited with an original author or date/time—everything pretends real-time “news”), videos on these two applications cannot be trusted to authenticate an event with a specific time and location, especially a “live” event. This seems to be the “permanent broadcast” that Ernst speaks of (111). However, unlike the traditional home video, these digital posts capture the myriads of connections surrounding a particular “document.” The videos aren’t screened to an audience in a concrete location, they shared in cyberspace. Instagram and Vine both have data trails ( or data mazes maybe) that show who posted what when, who liked or commented on particular posts when, and who reproduced the images with their own accounts when. As Aasman describes, using these apps is a practice, each one “a democratized archive that embraces new methods of participatory and collaborative archival work” (255).

The libertarian socialist in me cannot help but think of the political implications of archiving data about networks of users instead of the documents themselves. On my Instagram, I have recently seen videos of organizations and individual activists unionizing adjunct professors, promoting the Fight for 15 campaigns to raise fast food workers’ wages, and celebrating MLK Day by protesting against police militarization. Historians and archivists may not always have the benefit of hunting down “original copies” of protest clips or the “first instance of instant replay” of a poet performing on the National Mall, but they may someday (legal and copyright ownership pending) have a list of usernames that connect to individual IP addresses and the timestamp for when those IP addresses connected . Using metadata, archivists may be able to track how the NAACP or Fight for 15 campaign shared information in 2015. Furthermore, Instagram and Vine as archives could include, similar to a record of written correspondences, the representational network of individuals who may have attended a protest. We can see who is responsible for archiving our cultural heritage, which may in fact be more valuable than what’s being collected.

While the videos of the real-life actions are a “performative form of memory,” the metadata from Instagram and Vine could provide pertinent information to an archivist or historian who would like to capture records of who was doing what with whom. If we embrace these new digital spaces as archives of transfer rather than storage, can’t we track the movement of discourse, even if the temporality and document ownership are wonky (Ernst 100)? If the goal of this digital video medium is different than analog media—based on participation in democracy, perhaps—the goal of the archive and the purpose of reviewing the archive itself must be different. The records may become less of a “he said, she said” and more about whose IP address was connecting to whom and why. Does a collected object’s temporal location really matter during an era when every reproduction is “news”?