The Politics of Digital Memory: Social Media as a New Historical Archive
Keywords:
Archival Theory, Digital Humanities, Digital Memory, Historical Archive, Social MediaAbstract
Social media platforms now host a volume of human experience that formal archives were never positioned to capture. This paper treats those platforms as an emergent historical archive and examines the political stakes of their existence, curation, and possible disappearance. Drawing on archival theory, memory studies, platform studies, and digital humanities, it argues that social media is a contested archive shaped by corporate interests, algorithmic ranking, and uneven access. Content moderation and data deletion are archival operations. Losses such as the MySpace music files and the closure of Vine show how fragile that record is under private custodianship. The archive skews toward the literate, the connected, and the English-speaking; its democratising effect is real but partial. The paper calls for preservation duties on platforms, institutional collecting capacity, and support for community-led archives.
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Data Availability Statement
This study does not generate or analyse original datasets. It is based entirely on published scholarly literature, publicly available institutional reports, and documented journalistic records of platform events. No primary data were collected, and accordingly no data repository deposit was made. Readers seeking the sources on which the argument rests are directed to the reference list at the end of this article.
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