Ska vi, kan vi, får vi? Sociala medier som röst och fenomen i svenska arkiv

In the future posts from social media will, without a doubt, be a very important source for researchers who seek to gain knowledge and understanding about human activity and life in the early twenty first-century, the society we live in and the communicative patterns that distinguish the relations between humans ! today. This 2 master thesis aims to examine how Swedish heritage and memory institutions appraise, collect and preserve digital born material generated in the context of web-based social applications. The research is carried out in three, qualitative semi structured interviews with informants working with social media within the context of cultural heritage. The informants are situated in three different public ALM institutions. In relation to the interviews, we also created a quantitative survey, which twenty six institutions answered. We focus on the archival division within the examined institutions and ask questions about their approach to social media as a voice and phenomena in their archival collections, and in the long run, in the context of being part of creating history and a collective memory. We also detect the hardwired challenges that this kind of digital material presents to the institutions that aim to capture and preserve them. Social media constitute a kind of material that is difficult to compare to other kinds of archival documents and that contributes to, in our opinion, the historical and cultural importance of them. Thus, our research shows that very few of the institutions that responded to our survey, collect their own or others’ social media events. To help us understand the contexts of social media and archives we approach our research using Terry Cook’s theories regarding the shifts in archival paradigms and Marco-appraisal, Anthony Gidden’s social theories about society and Michel Foucault’s thoughts about power and discipline. Master’s thesi