For me, considerations of social media always seem to come back to questions around its place in archives.  One of the biggest concerns for archivists relating to social media is how exactly to go about acquiring and saving posts.  There are issues of ownership, technological concerns, and questions around what else needs to be saved beyond the actual text of posts in order for them to have any value, such as comments and links.

On some social media sites, however, people post not with the intention of creating something that they – or anyone else – will go back and look at in the future (or even the next few days for that matter).  And now there is Snapchat, which brings this presumed ephemeral nature of Twitter into actuality.  There are also scripts available that will automatically delete your tweets after a week (or whatever period of time that you designate).

This leads me to wonder whether or not such posts should ever be considered to be part of a person or organization’s permanent record.  They are often used as just a new form of conversation, after all, and we do not try to archive conversations.  Archives have always collected letters, and one could make the argument that tweets are just a (very) new form of letter writing.  Emails certainly are, but tweets are different.  They are written in a differnt way and for different reasons.

I guess the question I am getting at here is not so much about whether or not tweets could have historical value, but to what degree archivists should consider the intent behind their creation.  If they were intended to be ephemeral, should they remain so?  Of course, libraries and archives already explicitly collect ephemera (for example, the Bodleian Library’s printed ephemera collection with material dating back to 1508), so perhaps this is nothing new!