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.
Hey Allison, I think you making an incredible argument about how people only use facebook as a place for storing happiness and in its entirety becoming an archival collections of the “ideal” life individuals have in their everyday lives. Which I totally agree with you to be an incorrect perspective of life in the 21st century if we are to look back later on in the future. Not only are we leaving out possibly important aspects of other emotion experiences (e.g. sad, mad, stressed, etc.) we may then associate them as unimportant life events. This can be compared to how we store memory and tell stories (reference to Chute “forgetting” vs. “remembering”) where there are some events in our lives that are deeply personal (perhaps traumatic even) that we wish to forget or to not want to reveal. That is where “silence” or a “gap” ultimately forms with issues concerning privacy. Therefore, I give you this question of to what extent do you think privacy may come into conflict with the process of archival collection of one’s full life, without leaving out anything that may affect the creation of silent gaps?
Emily, you brought up a really good point about how privacy could clash with the goal to archive everything. I mentioned in my post that natural silences could be both good and bad; some serve to actually promote “reflection and personal growth”, and they serve that purpose better if they are withheld. For example, if you become really sick with a life-threatening illness, you can choose to withhold it because you want time and space to think about your life. In contrast, if someone doesn’t get the job that they have been working hard for, the main reason that it doesn’t go on Facebook is because of the shame associated with failure, when failure is a natural part of life. You are so right though; there are many times when the line is blurred, and I guess that’s where privacy comes in: you get to choose what you post. The main idea is that you realize that what you post is going down in history, and what you don’t post is going down in history as well, just as a gap.
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Hi Allison,
I really enjoyed the connection you bring between Facebook and our class discussion of archiving. I too believe that Facebook and other social media sites are the new digital archives, as the amount of storage capabilities are limitless. I also liked how you touched on the idea that Facebook posts are generally happy and those are the posts that silence the truths of dark times, which may distort the reality of one’s life. However, just as a thought I feel as though there is a certain social etiquette or “collective conscious” (sociologically speaking) in regards to Facebooking. It seems as though Facebook plays an important role in filtering what gets shown on the news feed, and also dictates how and what we post. Although Facebook presents itself to be a free and safe area to share, the act of Facebooking may inhibit us from posting certain things because it does not follow “Facebook mannerism”. For example, if there is an individual who is consistently posting about their break ups, sappy love song lyrics, despite the fact that this individual is going through a hard time in their life, we as the audience may not want to see that clogging up our newsfeed. Which is why Facebook has offered a button which can hide posts because “I don’t want to see this” then it goes on to ask…
Why don’t you want to see this photo?
• It’s annoying or not interesting
• I think it shouldn’t be on Facebook
• I’m in this photo and I don’t like it
• It’s spam
Sorry this turned into a bit of a ramble. My point being is that, Facebook itself discourages negative posts from being on the newsfeed, and although the individual will have every post on their personal profile. So, with that being said, do you think that the act of Facebooking plays an even bigger role as an archivists because they may be selecting and encouraging the types of posts that gets publicised. In addition, what further implications does this have on the “silences” or “gaps”?
Lynsee, thanks for the insightful comment. You’re so right: Facebook is definitely an archivist, and I don’t think that they’re thinking about the implications of their actions for the future. Facebook’s stated purpose isn’t to archive; it’s to be a social media site to keep people in touch with each other. However, as much as they don’t think that they are an archive/archivist, they are. This is a prediction, but I think fifty years from now, we will look back at archives and see huge silences and gaps in between all the happy accomplishments of people’s lives. While it is our fault that we often don’t recognize that it’s okay to have failures, Facebook plays a huge role in helping us decide what is socially acceptable and unacceptable to post. Yes, some things are personal, and we can choose not to post them, but I also believe that failures have been “personalized.” What I mean by this is that society says be open to sharing about a job promotion, but it’s a personal matter if you get a job demotion. Failures are not shameful, but society and Facebook kind of tells us that they are. I hope this answered your question or at least that I explained myself a little better.