In 2005 I started working for American Eagle Outfitters. Our website was a key factor to growth but stores were still the main factor. We utilized no social media at the time. Cut to 2015. Our website and mobile sales now contribute to more than 50% of our sales. Between Facebook, Twitter and Instagram alone we can connect with almost 15 million followers daily. Across all channels of media we receive over 2 billion impressions a year— an impossible reach for print or other forms of traditional advertising. Yes, I am referring to retail, and while it may be light years from the academic world, I really feel the same trajectory applies to history and digital history. Social media, at its core is first and foremost about creating access. It is a tool that was developed as a means to allow people to connect and engage and communicate. The purpose of historians is to share the research and information they have gathered and recorded—to help connect and align humanity. The goals are similar. At times they work perfectly together and at other times it can be a disaster. Kate Theimer writes about the future in her first chapter of Web 2.0 Tools and Strategies for Archives and Local History Collections. At the time these tools were new and left historians unsure and insecure. But today these tools are all commonplace in DH today. Research can’t happen without tagging, bookmarking and RSS. Is it a fad? Not at all. Has it changed the way we record history? Yes. And also the way we research and study and share our thoughts. But it doesn’t change history. Facts are the facts. Preservation requires the same skill and craft and care. As Pooja wrote in her forum, platforms change, people don’t.
What social media does create, however, is a new set of problems that eventually we will overcome as we did Theimer’s concerns. In terms of privacy, accuracy, trickery and gimmicks we must always work to keep history pure, especially when crowdsourcing is allowed. Trevor Owens discusses the benefits and the pitfalls from a 2010 perspective but the same points still echo today. “We can offer users an opportunity to deeply explore, connect with and contribute to public memory and we can’t let anything get in the way of that.” In the end, isn’t that always the job of a historian?