What are social media and why do we archive them?

Social media are identified with the rise of Web 2.0 and the era of increasing online interactivity, personalization, the use of mobile devices and cloud computing. A broad definition like the one proposed by Treem et al. (2016, pp. 770), who see social media as technologies that “create a way for individuals to maintain current relationships, to create new connections, to create and share their own content, and, in some degree, to make their own social networks observable to others” could be helpful for archivists and other information professionals that are looking for ways to define what to include in their social media archiving policies.

The use of WhatsApp to organize protests in Egypt in the early 2010s and Sudan in 2019 (Shendi 2020) or Telegram’s role in spreading right-wing ideologies through multi-user chatrooms (Urman and Katz 2020), or again, the use of the Discord messaging service for “Corona-time” virtual parties and the Twitch streaming platform to stream yoga sessions as well as PhD defenses during the coronavirus pandemic, all indicate that social media usage is always evolving beyond initial intended purposes.

One of the challenges for tomorrow’s archival institutions will be to remain open to the shifts happening in the information and digital communications landscape, in order to keep collecting what is valuable to be preserved beyond limitations of medium or intended use.