By Andrew Prescott
This was great. A very helpful piece of writing that was in the recommend reading for my seminar Digital Culture: Collaborative projects.
The bulk of the text discussed community archives or counter archives, as I have previously called them. Prescott discusses how these archives have been forced to work on commercial platforms like Facebook and Instagram. But on the flip side these archives do create a sense of community around the archival material, which often cannot be found in brick and mortar archives (BAM archives). This community archives in a way that is contrary to all the systems and rituals that take place in BAM archives. It’s chaotic and there is no categorisation at all. But it is being used.
Now this is where an interesting paradox comes into play. The more i read about archives the more I see the importance of building a community and tradition around a history. Oral traditional survive because of strong communities. A strong community therefore equals pretty good sustainability of a history. However, this is where the paradox comes in because currently these communities are hosted on commercial platforms that have no proven longevity or sustainability. Counter or communities archives often do not have a sustainability plan which has caused many to disappear. So the question is how can we capture the sustainability housed in strong communities while avoiding the pitfalls of modern technology?
However there is another far more consequential down side to counter archives being housed on social media – radicalisation. Due to the algorithms that operate on social media platforms these groups can become breeding grounds for radicalisation. They are community bubbles and you never know how far away you are from a new recommended group.