Sarah Hall explores tensions between oral histories and personal archives based on the AboutFace project for The Polyphony. In this article, Sarah considers what happens when researchers approach social media content as a historical source.
With social media ubiquitous in daily life, personal stories are constantly aired, shared, and discussed openly on different digital platforms. Users hungrily consume details of other peoples’ lives, gratified by the illusion that they have the same access to celebrities and influencers through DMs and comments, as they do members of their own social circle. Content creators share their personal experiences openly (albeit curated), to build a following based on a sense of community and friendship. Others use their platforms and lived experience to educate and inform, answering questions and raising awareness. But what is this social media to historians? Following a socio-cultural shift where it has almost become expected to share intimate details of your life with an online community, historians arguably have access to an unprecedented body of available source material. But what is this content? How should we approach it? Moreover, do we have the right to use these stories in our research, and what are our ethical obligations to the people sharing them?
In my role as the Public Engagement and Events Officer on AboutFace, I use social media as a research tool to investigate public perceptions of face transplants. Specifically, to see what transplant patients are posting publicly online. This work has prompted me to think carefully about the ways historians could and should use social media as a primary source and as a research tool, and the ethical implications of doing so. While there are a growing number of methodologies and approaches to oral history and social media, these largely concern sharing stories, with much less attention paid to capturing them.
Read the full article here, and don’t miss Sarah’s blog on social media and face transplant patients if you want to learn more.
