Tag Archives: Social Media

OHD_BLG_0065 New words among other things

Readings:

Community archives and the health of the internet by Andrew Prescott

Steering Clear of the Rocks: A Look at the Current State of Oral History Ethics in the Digital Age by Mary Larson

Sometimes I feel like we are in the trenches with our machine guns and old military tactics…

This ain’t for you

People live their lives in very specific ways. They have certain rituals and values that they hold very close to their hearts. However it is very unlikely that everyone else in the world has the same approach to life as you do. Some people do not use the right tea towel in my opinion, some people think it is perfectly fine to wear socks in sandals, and some people a zero problems with eating meat everyday. In the case of Prescott’s paper on community archives/Facebook groups we have an academic freaking out because a community is not archiving properly something which he considers to be a great sin, and yes, in a certain way it is a great shame that a community archive is not sustainable because of the platform used or the limited funding. This is especially the case when you come from an oral history angle where one really wants to preserve the voices of those who current fall outside of history. However, maybe we need to remove the academic lens in these situations, maybe these archives just aren’t for you. They have a different, more temporary, function to bring people together over a shared history. They are about sharing history not preserving history like archives do.

This is where I think I (as an academic ) feel that my role is not to impose my beliefs onto these make-do archives but instead build better tools to support them. A community archive on Facebook is a different beast to the university backed oral history project. Truly it is a shame that this knowledge might go missing, but then I suggest that we get more minorities to work in academia rather than dictate what we think they should do.

It’s a power thing.

Anonymity is anti-oral history ?

…, anonymity is antithetical to the goals of oral history if there are no exacerbating risk factors.
Mary Larson

Anonymity, accountability, freedom of speech, privacy, welcome to the 21st century. There is the opinion within the field of oral history that anonymity is against the principles of oral history. This is mostly because oral history demands a high level of context in its reuse, which makes complete sense. However does that mean that all information should be available? Is it impossible to have different levels of anonymity?

It seems odd that currently when it comes to privacy we have to work in such absolutes. You can get a certain level of privacy on the internet but that often requires lots of digging around and downloading plugins that send out white noise. You basically have to spend time fending off those who run the platforms you use, which when put in a AFK context would be the equivalent of the shop keeper pickpocketing you while you were shopping. Currently privacy and anonymity equals not using either the internet or archives, which defeats the point.

Why is this our only option?

Well, in my opinion it is not. We just need to get a bit more creative for example:

Use pseudonyms
Use other identifiers e.g. White, young adult, middle class, female (that’s me)
Use identifiers + 𝓲𝓶𝓪𝓰𝓲𝓷𝓪𝓽𝓲𝓸𝓷. There are loads of researchers who have to use their imagination because history has not been good at recording their subject
Only allow access to certain information if you either visit the BAM archive or ask for permission
Generally encourage more thorough and ethical reuse and research

New words

To elaborate on that last point we currently approach the ethics around archiving from the donating angle; if everything is correctly archived now there will definitely be no more problems in the future. This attitude I do not find very sustainable because attitudes towards ethics change all the time. So instead I purpose a different angle: ethical reuse of archival material lies predominantly with the reuser not the donator. This is where I would also like to insert the ‘new’ words. Instead of using the terms ethical and ethics we instead use responsibility and care, because the former is so slippery so ‘high-level’ thinking that it loses its meaning while the latter are more human words. Responsibility and care are concepts that you teach your children. They are more instinctive. So what I wish for is more care and responsibility from those who reuse oral histories. I want the reuser to remember the human-ness of the archive and the responsibility they have to care for their other humans.

NOTE: this is why I love the idea of archival ghosts so much because it gives the oral histories a face.

OHD_BLG_0072 Community archives and the health of the internet

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By Andrew Prescott

This was great. A very helpful piece of writing that was in the recommend reading for my seminar Digital Culture: Collaborative projects.

The bulk of the text discussed community archives or counter archives, as I have previously called them. Prescott discusses how these archives have been forced to work on commercial platforms like Facebook and Instagram. But on the flip side these archives do create a sense of community around the archival material, which often cannot be found in brick and mortar archives (BAM archives). This community archives in a way that is contrary to all the systems and rituals that take place in BAM archives. It’s chaotic and there is no categorisation at all. But it is being used.

Now this is where an interesting paradox comes into play. The more i read about archives the more I see the importance of building a community and tradition around a history. Oral traditional survive because of strong communities. A strong community therefore equals pretty good sustainability of a history. However, this is where the paradox comes in because currently these communities are hosted on commercial platforms that have no proven longevity or sustainability. Counter or communities archives often do not have a sustainability plan which has caused many to disappear. So the question is how can we capture the sustainability housed in strong communities while avoiding the pitfalls of modern technology?

However there is another far more consequential down side to counter archives being housed on social media – radicalisation. Due to the algorithms that operate on social media platforms these groups can become breeding grounds for radicalisation. They are community bubbles and you never know how far away you are from a new recommended group.

OHD_BLG_0076 ʇǝɹɔǝs ʞɹɐp ǝɥʇ

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In Frisch’s ‘Three dimensions and more’ he discusses the idea of the deep dark secret of oral history being like the unopened shoe box of homemade videos – unwatched. After digesting this idea for the last two years I suddenly realised something. Oral history as a field exists because of technological advancements. The field is completely intertwine with technology: the recording devices used to make the first recordings, the internet now allowing for international zoom interviews, it all depends on technology. This made me think that maybe the deep dark secret is not an oral history problem but in fact a technology problem. It’s not oral history’s fault that much of technology is not particularly focused on sustainable storage. There is focus on speedy communication; phones, text messages, social media and trading; online shopping and targeted advertising. Even accessing knowledge (aka googling) is not based on accuracy but more speed and attention.

Digital storage is a minefield from ‘things that exist on the internet forever’ to link rot and from the now unreadable mini-disc to hard drives that can store two terabytes of data. It is so extreme that it is clear that no has really thought about beyond uploading it. Technology, like many things in capitalist society live solely in the present, so the way it views time extremely 2-dimensional. There is no thought about how this attitude towards storage affects the past or the future. The amount of time and money that is required to keep archives up to date with their digitisation is not covered by the amount of money and time archives actually have. Beyond the archive our day to day interaction and documentation has an unknown future. What are your next of kin going to do with your Facebook page when you die? Or your instagram? Your Snapchat? Your emails? Your iCloud? Your laptop, smart phone, hard drivers and tablets? Currently it is likely that it will either disappear or be inaccessible.

The way we store our data in this blasé way has the potential to create a black hole of information in the timeline of human history. This attitude is completely inefficient when it comes to accessing and reusing. Unless of course you are Facebook, Google or Apple. These mega gods of information are able to mine astronomical amounts of data and use it. But in order to use it they strip every single bit of humanity from the process. The only way to use the truly insane amounts of data is by reducing the human producer so much that literally become zeros and ones. No feelings, no aura, just nothing. Oral history cannot do this because oral history is fundamentally human. Just like home videos that are filled with nostalgia and memory, they take time to watch or listen to because there is so much emotion and memory that needs to be digested while viewing. But the data that is used by big tech is void of this emotion.

In conclusion, due to oral history’s long term yet slightly abusive relationship with technology it has got this deep dark secret of unused archives. But in truth technology does not support what archives are trying to do. The creators of this technology just do not give a shit because that’s the nature of the capitalistic beast. I suggest therefore that we take a reverse attitude towards this relationship. Oral history needs to inform tech what they need in order to make archives work better because clearly tech has no idea what it is doing.

OHD_BLG_0080 The Virtual Rooms

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I have just found out about the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. Actually that is incorrect I have just googled the “phenomenon where you hear something for the first time and then again” and found out that it is referred to as the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon (for no particular reason in case you were wondering). The reason I was googling this idea was not just because I was wondering if someone had named this occurrence but because I today I heard about the Clubhouse for the first time and then listened to a podcast where they repeatedly mentioned it. Clubhouse is an exclusive audio social platform app, which you need to be invited to in order to part take in it. It’s basically an app where you can do call in radio sessions and then it deletes everything afterwards. I found it because of a Guardian article about its sudden popularity in China, but it has been around for a while and has already become quite problematic (Elon Musk is a fan).

I started connecting some dots in my head after reading this, because it was only last week that someone I was zooming with mentioned that they sometimes hung out in “online libraries”. These online libraries are literally just people studying in a zoom call together. These online libraries, Clubhouse and my sister’s latest obsessions of minecraft streamers and late night discord games all take place in virtual spaces, but live ones. Not like Reddit or Twitter, even though these can be consumed at some speed you still need to scroll and read to get through everything. But these new(-ish) spaces use audio and video. It seems less filtered and also less monitored.

So I did some googling and sure enough I found a MIT press article that talks exactly about how we might be moving back to using our phones for audio purposes. This is great news for me as this means only more technological advancements in audio text recording. Now to only makes sure my serves don’t fill up with White supremacists and/or very annoying misogynistic Elon Musk types.