Unit I: Social Media Archiving [Reading time: 10 Min]
Unit I: Social Media Archiving [Reading time: 10 Min]
Do you save things on and from social media?
Do you save things on and from social media?
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In July of 2014, Facebook (now Meta) introduced its save function to its platform, restructuring how Facebook users think and remember. I began relying on the save feature heavily in early 2016. This new platform feature stoked me as a second-year in college. In addition to connecting with family and friends--and let us be honest, indulging the voyeur within myself--I used Facebook to learn and access information about minoritized communities at home and across the globe. However, this did not mean I had the time or the cognitive capacity to ingest all the information I was interested in. Here is where the save feature came in handy.
The save feature positions itself as a necessary component in not only offloading one's cognitive burden but also automating one's recall capacity. Moreover, when users upload media onto Facebook, they invariably rely on Facebook to store or host the media until it gets taken down, either by Facebook's moderators or by the user themselves. In other words, what changes if we think of social media platforms as "free" cloud storage services? Thinking about social media platforms as cloud storage services is not a far-fetched claim as platforms like Facebook and Instagram are already influencing user behavior in a direction that strengthens users' memory and storage reliance on the platform itself. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have all introduced their version of the "save" feature, which has proved beneficial for us overburdened users.
Author's personal archives on Instagram and Twitter
Keep in mind, though, that as users, the save feature may seem like a boon for our overactive newsfeeds. However, the ultimate goal is always to extend user engagement and user reliance on the platform. The commercial logic embedded within these platforms is still in operation, even when these platforms purport to help us.
Tweets, Retweets, Likes, & Shares are just "Data"!?
Tweets, Retweets, Likes, & Shares are just "Data"!?
It is essential to keep this socio-technical context of our online behaviors as we approach social media as a research site. For example, recent scholarship on new media influence has shed significant light on how popular social media platforms and search engines are involved in the business of surveillance and reifying existing social inequalities in our society. Such findings have generated considerable interest in social media as a site of research across disciplines, especially for folks interested in topics of online hate, fandoms, LGBTQ communities, or alt-right mobilizations.
In the context of such topics, if we think about social media data as just tweets, retweets, or a number of likes, we end up losing significant characteristics about the data itself. In such instances, it is helpful to turn to our friends in the social sciences; ethnographers and qualitative researchers employ different terms to describe their data and data sources, which can signal the power relations between the data source and the researcher. Here I am thinking of terms like interlocuter, respondent, or community member. Moreover, how does our perception change if we consider social media data as testimonies, oral histories, or witness accounts? I would argue that it brings back the human abstracted out of the data collection process.
Is it "Data" or "Capta"?
Is it "Data" or "Capta"?
Scholar Johanna Drucker brings our attention to this abstraction process in her discussion of data and capta in her 2011 essay titled "Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display." Capta is a term used amongst phenomenologists to denote data as conscious experience. Drucker notes the etymological distinction between the two terms, where data is assumed to be given, and capta connotes active taking. This distinction is helpful for digital humanists and researchers alike because it signals the logic of 'active taking,' which is embedded in our automated data collection processes. Furthermore, it brings questions of unequal power dynamics between ordinary users and social media researchers to the fore. When working with large social media data sets, we often use scripts that help automate our data collection.
For example, let us look at the case of Twitter. Twitter has actively made its content available for academic research, which may appear to us researchers as Twitter freely giving us data, but that is highly presumptuous. Even if Twitter advertises itself as a public micro-broadcasting platform, it does not mean that its users are aware or onboard with Twitter's definition of public and private. Remember, these platforms are commercially driven, even if they allegedly offer us their services for free. We know it is not for free because these platforms actively ingest huge loads of human behavioral data, personal information, geolocation, and much more from their users. Now some of that information is being shared with the academic community to better the platform. This is a seductive proposal for us researchers in DH because why shouldn't we check out these publicly released Twitter datasets? Personally, we should experiment with such datasets, albeit with considerable caution and reflection. It is crucial to think about our positionality as a researcher and consider whether we are approaching such large datasets about human behavior through ideas of ethical research conduct or commercialism.
In the next unit, we will critically reflect upon web scraping processes and discuss some potential approaches to scraping data from Twitter.
Review [15 minutes]
Review [15 minutes]
Now it's your turn to reflect upon your own social media archiving practices!
1) Log in to your social media accounts and take a visual note of all the things you have saved and uploaded on your social media accounts
By visual note, I suggest doing a cursory check. Out of all the things that you have saved, how many of the posts belong to other users? How many of the posts are your own? If they are your own images or infographics, have you saved or uploaded them elsewhere? Would it be okay if they somehow got deleted from your accounts?
2) After this visual check, how would you rate your reliance on the platform on a scale of 1 to 10?
If you are feeling stressed by your reliance on these platforms and are reassessing your partnership, maybe even thinking about deleting your accounts, I suggest checking out online articles that provide guides on account deletion. A good guide will often spend time discussing user data and how to gain back some control of your data. Here are some: Delete Facebook // Delete Twitter // Delete Instagram
3) Consider the following scenario and reflect: Let's say you belong to the school of thought that the earth is flat and are a vocal tweeter about it. A group of social scientists studying 'flat-earth believers' come across your tweets and decide to use it for their study. None of the researchers actually contacted you, but they go ahead and publish the study, which includes your tweets and your username. How do you feel? Does it matter that it's on a public platform? Did you ever think that your tweets would be researched or studied?
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