Monthly Archives: January 2014

The Street Corner newspaper silence

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In Issue #167, published on October 1, 2007, the Street Corner newspaper’s mission statement was “to build livelihoods for socially excluded citizens and to break down stereotypes by empowering individuals and informing community.” As a newspaper dedicated to helping homeless people gain profit by selling said newspapers, their goal of changing the structure of society and breaking down hierarchy is a noble one.

Whether they fulfill that goal or not is a completely different question.

From the very beginning, Street Corner recognizes homeless people as “socially excluded”, acknowledging that there is a social gap between the homeless and presumably the non-homeless. This exclusion is an act of marginalization.

In his article “Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence”, Rodney Carter says that “archival silences… have a potentially disastrous impact on the marginalized groups.” Whether Street Corner has read Carter’s article or not, they acknowledge the potential archival gap due to marginalization, and they attempt to fill the gap.

However, I am arguing that they are going about it the wrong way. Carter borrows some words from Harris’ “The Archival Sliver” and says that “archivists must not further marginalize the marginalized, [they] must resist the urge to speak for others… and [they] must attempt to avoid reinforcing the marginalization by naming it.” With their mission statement, Street Corner clearly reinforces the marginalization by labeling the homeless as “socially excluded citizens”. In addition, they speak for the homeless in many articles.

As we were in the Rare Books and Special Collections of UBC these past two weeks, I got the chance to peruse through several 2007 issues of Street Corner. Many of the feature articles I read were not written by any homeless people; they were articles by photographers or interviewers who shared their perspective on these “socially excluded citizens”. In the article “Close Up From the Outside”, a feature story about photographer Lung Liu, there are zero quotes by homeless people, only pictures. How do we know if they wanted their story to be told in the way that it was? How do we know if the way that Street Corner interpreted it was correct?

The truth is that we will never know. We must be especially cautious when archivists are intentionally trying to fill in gaps, because they can often take devious means to gain the end.

Facebook as an inaccurately happy archive.

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In an ideal world, archives would contain everything. From grocery receipts to address books to business contracts, the archives would have it all, because their purpose is essentially to store and preserve the past.

But alas, we do not live in an ideal world. Not everything can be preserved, and not everything is preserved. While Carter explores the forced silence of marginal groups in his article “Of Things Said and Unsaid: Power, Archival Silences, and Power in Silence”, I want to explore silence in archives a little closer to home – Facebook.

Before getting into how we are promoting silence in archives, I want to clarify Facebook as an archive. Now, less and less documentation of events and people are being recorded on paper; instead, digital files of pictures, emails, or Facebook statuses are taking on the role of archiving. In the future, we are going to have to rely a lot more on electronic sources to show us what the past was like.

There have been quite a few studies done to show that people tend to post on Facebook only the “good” things in their life – and by good, I mean things like accomplishments, happy moments, smiles, and healthy relationships. Editor Libby Copeland writes an intriguing article called “The Anti-Social Network” on how the lack of “bad” things on one’s profile – struggles, hard days, failures, frowns – makes peers feel worse about themselves. Based on a psychology study done at Stanford, “The Anti-Social Network” is concerned with how we are promoting sad feelings and negative emotions. However, we are looking at this habit of happy posting from an archivist’s point of view.

Twenty years from now, when archivists are looking through people’s Facebook profiles to access information about the past, almost all of what they find will be happy, smiley, and pretty things. In this case, the silence or the gap is all of the struggles and hardships in people’s lives. The truth of the matter is, the gap may be bigger than what is present in the archive. What’s even worse is that we are contributing to this gap.

On page 228 of his article, Carter defines “natural silences” as “those entered into by choice, often to allow for reflection and personal growth.” He makes natural silence out to be a good thing, but I have to disagree in the case of Facebook. No matter how socially unacceptable we think it is to post struggles or hardships on Facebook, we do have a choice. This gap isn’t an unnatural silence; we are not being silenced “through the use of power.” Not only should we be trying not to make peers feel worse about themselves, but as archivists, as Facebook users, we have a duty to record our lives – not just the fun things, but the hard ones as well.

Twenty years from now, I want to look back at my Facebook archive and see my life in all of its colours – bright, warm, dark and cold. The only way to prevent the potential future gap is to not be silent, stopping Facebook from becoming an inaccurately happy archive.