Presenting History: Social Media and Public History

Created as a tool for communication, connection and relationship building, it has become the very means by which people create their identity, present their lives and curate their experiences for worldwide public consumption.

Social media is now not merely a communicative tool to help ‘give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together’, but is now a performative structure through which people form their identities, experience the world, interact with one another, record their memories and take on the role of personal archivist and curator, as they create, collate, store and present their experiences to the public.

It is difficult to overstate the impact and influence social media, in all its forms, has had on the world. It has changed the face of human interaction, foundationally disrupted the socialisation process of children and forged new paths for employment and commerce.

New sectors have been created by social media. Elections and politics are effected by it, even national discourse is presented and conducted on social media. Everyday, 3.96 billion people log into their social media accounts to spend, on average, 95 minutes of their time scrolling through their feeds, liking other people’s photos and posting some of their own. Bouncing between, on average, seven different platforms every month, each user has, whether by conscious choice or not, integrated social media into their daily routines, day-to-day habits and personal identities.

This is not only an individualised phenomena either. Businesses, organisations and charities are all embracing social media, and, if they are not, they are experiencing the intense consequences. To not engage with social media is to hamstring one’s company, business or organisation, leaving them in the dust, behind the times and losing widespread public engagement. Social media is not a ‘new frontier’ anymore, it is the established, foundational, dominant and overreaching structure through which most, if not all, experiences are filtered, lives are lived, businesses are found and interacted with, communication is done and identities performed.

This is no different for heritage sites, museums and historians. Selfies, photos, likes, retweets, videos, all are becoming fundamental parts of a visitor’s experience of a museum. Social media has so cemented itself in the lives of all people that without it, their experience of the museum or heritage site is only halfway complete. How will anyone know that someone has visited a museum or institution, if it is not posted on social media? It is almost a non-event if it is not presented on social media for public consumption and approval.

Yet, it is not only the visitor that contends with these platforms. The museums and heritage sites must learn to utilise and take advantage of social media in order to drive engagement and visitor conversion. It is also an opportunity for these places to present and publicise history. As history becomes more prevalent on social media, it is swiftly becoming the foremost way in which people interact with the past. It is the responsibility of museums, heritage sites and institutions to create output that gives accuracy, facts and correct information. The landscape of history on social media is becoming exceedingly saturated, with many misleading narratives and ‘facts’ gaining traction.

Holocaust denial is rife, especially on Facebook. It is the institutions, museums and people for whom history is their main focus that should assume the responsibility of combating this rising tide.

Social media opens up fascinating ground for museums and heritage sites to try and cover, something that they have been notoriously slow at doing in recent years. Eva Pfanzelter, professor of Memory and Politics of Memory and Digital Humanities at the University of Innsbruck, has noticed that ‘museums, memorials, and the scholarly world always seem to lag behind public historians unbound by institutional restrictions and historiographic customs.’ Not only is social media a pervasive feature of modern society as a whole, it is also becoming a fundamental factor within cultures of remembrance and the visitor’s experience of the site. This is something that Christoph Bareither, professor of Historical and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tübingen, has noted, writing:

‘Looking at social media, we also see that for many visitors, performing and experiencing their personal relationship to the past is not the end of the story. Instead, they are often shared. The personal experiences of individuals in contemporary digital cultures of remembrance have high socio-cultural value and can contribute to the constitution of and exchange within emotional communities.’

While a visitor may experience a historical or heritage site alone, they will curate, reimagine and present those experiences for social media; an individual experience made collective. They will reinterpret their original interpretations of a historical site or museum to make it viewable and digestible for the wider public. Not only their immediate public, but the global public. While the term ‘public’ is contentious and multifaceted, it is used here to describe everyone that will come into contact with a person’s social media post.

Inherent within this, therefore, is the performativity of social media. The very structure of the platforms lends themselves to the creation of a persona and the performing of an identity. Meghan Lundrigan, doctor of Public History and Social Media at Carleton University, drawing on the work of Lev Manovich, professor of Computer Science at the City University of New York, writes that ‘What people photograph, how people photograph, and where they share such images are always connected to the fashioning of their own sense of self.’ Depending on a scholar’s theoretical understandings of identity, whether they hold to a representationalist view or a performative perspective, social media either enables a user to construct a version of their identity they wish to present, or is a fundamental, even decisive factor, in the user’s creation of their actual, ‘IRL’ identity.

Ultimately, whether a scholar is a representationalist or a performativist, the outcome remains the same: social media has a profound and formative role in the creation and presentation of the identity of the user. They are creating their very identity through their curation, archiving and performing of their experiences and memories. Social media is, simultaneously, the stage upon which a person will perform, and the furnace within which a person is formed.

This becomes a double-barrelled issue when it comes to history presented on social media. The first barrel is that of visitor experience and their presentation of it on social media. The second is the inherent performativity of social media and its natural impact on the presentation of history on social media. Every account from a museum, heritage site, historian or institution is run by a person. It is not an objective artificial intelligence system that will arbitrarily post historical content. Even if it were an AI system, it had to be originally programmed by a person, meaning that the performative nature of the posts is not alleviated and the issue still stands.

People naturally perform for social media, and this does not change when they are managing an account for an institution or museum. They just change role. They take on the position of spokesperson for the account. They, therefore, perform as the voice of the institution. This might not be their natural performance, but it is a performance nonetheless. This will impact and influence how history is presented online, and is a colouration of the content that will need to be taken into account by the institution or site when posting.

There are a number of ways historical content is effected by the performative nature of social media:

1. Content can become crafted specifically for emotional impact. In the best case, this can lead to greater emphasis being placed on those historical accounts or stories with the most emotional resonance. In the extreme, this can lead to something this essay will refer to as ‘clickbait history’, where certain areas of a story are pulled out and highlighted for the greatest attention and most engagement. This can lead to narratives or facts being taken out of context or misused, all for the clickbait title. This is, in the least, a misuse of history, and at worst, a dangerous precedent to be starting.
2. Content can be picked for its support of an overall narrative rather than for its own historical merit. A museum or institution may specifically choose a certain story or fact that best supports their political, ideological or historical agenda. When posting on social media, one of the main goals is self-presentation, and if a historical fact or story might oppose the institution’s identity or narrative, they are not going to post about it. A fine example of this is how history was originally presented by the National Trust. The fact that some of their homes were built on the back of the slave trade, or the owners themselves slave-owners, was overlooked and sidelined; the lives and treatment of servants and the ‘downstairs folk’ was often made more comfortable or digestible; the history of minorities or marginalised groups was often white-washed and dismissed. This is in the process of being rectified, as a monumental internal report from the National Trust has been written regarding these issues.
3. Content can be interpreted through experience rather than fact. One of the risks of posting historical content online is that the facts or stories a user is posting can sometimes tell more about their personal experiences than the actual facts. The content becomes more about how that person experienced the site or museum, than what was actually presented there. This can muddy the waters around the historical narrative being presented. It is easy, in these cases for personal experiences to be, at best, mistaken for, and at worst, active replacements of facts. On the one hand, interacting with people’s experiences and their interpretations of historical sites is powerful, and useful for connection. But, on the other, it is not enough to merely interact with people’s experiences in the place of historical fact. Just because someone experienced a historical story as being sad or upsetting, doesn’t necessarily mean that the actual story was sad or upsetting for the people who actually experienced it. A notable example of this can be found in the presentation of recruitment and service in World War One. In the modern world, the pervasive idea is that the soldiers were naïve, duped into serving their country for very little reason and for very little gain. Modern people experience the First World War with hindsight, with modern sensibilities and an understanding that millions of lives were lost throughout the war. But, this cannot overshadow or replace the fact that many soldiers went to war fully competent of what they were doing, rushing to protect and defend a smaller nation and serve their country. Whether the modern world thinks it was pointless or unnecessary does not negate the fact that the soldiers themselves might have felt the opposite. A person’s experience of a museum or historical site cannot trump the facts presented within.
4. Content is entirely at the mercy of the account’s manager. The social media manager or personality will only post that content which they find interesting, of high quality or as useful for public consumption. This is entirely subjective, leaving plenty of historical content left un-posted purely because the user didn’t find it personally interesting or exciting.
5. Content is entirely democratised. Even if it is an official institution, museum or heritage site that posts on social media, the mere fact of posting it immediately democratises the historical story or content. The public is automatically invited into the historiographical and presentation process. Their opinions are readily accepted and interacted with, whether the institution condones them or not. An institution cannot control the comments a post might get. If they do, by turning off the comments or by filtering them, they will be accused of hindering engagement and hamstringing the public’s interaction with the historical story or content. It will also negatively effect their analytics, legitimately impacting their user engagement and public reach. Not only this, but history itself has become increasingly democratised. It is not the preserve of the educated elite academics anymore, the layperson can interact with and present history whenever and however they wish. Academia is becoming a smaller, and increasingly shrinking, part of public historical discourse. The democratisation of history is something that social media has played a large role in completing. It allows people who would have never have had a voice to vocalise their opinions and thoughts to a large, global, audience. Where once it would be the role of an academic to give the final word on a historical issue, it is now open for anyone and everyone to have an opinion and voice it. Match this with readily available historical research and sources online, the layperson can, oftentimes, make a case for a historical idea that is sometimes more compelling or complete than a similar post from an academic. While it may be rare, it is possible, where it would not have been before. This is both a positive and a negative. Part of the role of Public History is to invite the wider public into the historiographical and presentation process; they are not passive recipients, but active participants. It is also a negative, as it can give rise to unfounded, misleading or, even, potentially dangerous historical content.
6. Content can be created entirely for the purpose of cross-cultural connection. This is a major positive of historical social media content, with marginalised narratives and stories being brought to light more readily. It is simple to make a quick tweet about Olaudah Equiano or John Blanke, and tell their stories in 140 characters or as part of a thread. Where it would have taken an academic paper, a book, a long-form documentary or a lecture series to bring these stories to light, constrained but the limits of publishers, public demand or deadlines, historians can now fire off a quick social media post that rapidly brings these stories to light and makes them readily available. This is a powerful tool that social media has afforded historians. This can also be an issue to wrestle with, however. Sometimes, minority stories or narratives can be so emphasised that they become the dominant narrative of an era or period. While they should be fundamentally involved in the overall story of a time, place or group of people, they cannot become the predominant narrative. It is not representative of the truth and can lead to a misleading view of the past. This is monumentally contentious, but something to contend with nonetheless.
7. Content can be created primarily for the purpose of debate. While this will inspire and ignite interesting and necessary conversations about history, it can also lead to a dangerous lack of official accuracy. The content might become so mired in the debate that the truth of the matter might end up being lost. A tweet sent out to ‘answer’ the debate or give the final word might be lost in the multitude of comments and opinions. This is a difficult balance to strike, and one that institutions need to keep in mind.

All these factors are key for institutions, heritage sites and museums to contend with. By overlooking these concerns, they run the risk of creating content that falls into the social media traps, or actively turn prospective visitors away. By going in eyes open, aware of the issues, agendas and influences that might hinder their content, a museum, organisation or historical site can create engaging, compelling, informative and accurate content.

Further Reading:

Amedie, Jacob, ‘The Impact of Social Media on Society’, Pop Culture Intersections, 2, (2015), p.3.

Subramanian, Kalpathy Ramaiyer, ‘Influence of Social Media in Interpersonal Communication’, INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS AND RESEARCH (IJSPR), 109, (2017), p.75.

Gündüz, Uğur, ‘The Effect of Social Media on Identity Construction’, Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, Vol 8, No 5, (September 2017), p.91.

Zuckerberg, Mark, ‘Bringing the World Closer Together’, Facebook, Last edited 15 March 2021, <https://www.facebook.com/notes/393134628500376/> [Accessed 19th May 2022].

‘Number of social network users worldwide from 2017 to 2025’, Statista, <https://www.statista.com/statistics/278414/number-of-worldwide-social-network-users/> [Accessed 19th May 2022].

‘US Social Media Usage 2021’, eMarketer, <https://www.emarketer.com/content/us-social-media-usage-2021> [Accessed 19th May 2022].

‘The biggest social media trends for 2022’, GWI, <https://www.gwi.com/reports/social> [Accessed 19th May 2022].

Pfanzelter, Eva, ‘At the crossroads with public history: mediating the Holocaust on the Internet’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, (Routledge, 2015), p.266.

Bareither, Christoph, ‘Difficult heritage and digital media: ‘selfie culture’ and emotional practices at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, (Routledge, 2020), pp.69-70.

Lundrigan, Meghan, Holocaust Memory and Visuality in the Age of Social Media, (Carleton University Ottawa, 2019), p.4.

‘The representationalist view of identity maintains that identity and its representation(s) are distinct. This separation goes much deeper than an analytical distinction; it is the belief in the power of words to reflect a pre- existing metaphysical substrate that supports social constructionist and traditional realist positions.’ [From Orsatti, Jo and Riemer, Kai, "Identity and Self-Presentation: from a Representational to a Performative Lens in Studying Social Media Engagement in Organisations" (2012). ACIS 2012 Proceedings. 110, p.3.]

‘A performative perspective explicitly rejects the belief that the essential properties of things inhere in those things and that we can only access knowledge of these properties though representations of them (Barad 2003). The benefit of adopting a view that rejects representationalism is that there is no longer a mediating layer between essential properties and potential knowledge of them. As the mediating layer dissipates our preconceived distinctions and so understandings brought about by them do too.’ [From Orsatti, Jo and Riemer, Kai, "Identity and Self-Presentation: from a Representational to a Performative Lens in Studying Social Media Engagement in Organisations" (2012). ACIS 2012 Proceedings. 110, p.6.]

‘IRL’ is a common internet acronym for ‘In Real Life’, used to differentiate between that which is performed for social media, and that which the user performs away from their camera.

Interim Report on the Connections between Colonialism and Properties now in the Care of the National Trust, Including Links with Historic Slavery, written by Frances Bailey, Dr Rachel Conroy, Sophie Chessum, Professor Corinne Fowler, Jane Gallagher, Dr Rupert Goulding, Dr Liz Green, Dr Sally-Anne Huxtable, Dr Christo Kefalas, Lucy Porten and Emma Slocombe. Edited by Dr Sally-Anne Huxtable, Professor Corinne Fowler, Dr Christo Kefalas, Emma Slocombe, (National Trust: September 2020).