Paper short abstract:

Social media, a site and form of cultural heritage, poses challenges for museums. This paper explores how the Museum of London collects, conserves and curates social media, analysing its dual role as a cultural artefact and a tool that can democratise and open up museum collecting and access.

Paper long abstract:

Social media is increasingly part of cultural expression, heritage and the formation of social worlds. People use social media for socialising, activism, political campaigning and information sharing. As such, museums and cultural organisations are beginning to experiment with collecting social media as a museum object and preserving this emergent type of object. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the curatorial team at the Museum of London (MoL), this paper looks at the process of collecting, curating and displaying social media as a born-digital object in the MoL’s collection. I break down the process of selecting whose voices to include when collecting social media, how to conserve this new and volatile form of object, and finally, the often contradictory responses that visitors had to seeing social media presented as cultural heritage in the MoL’s displays. I explore how social media is viewed as a “difficult” object that challenges the public’s understanding of cultural heritage, as well as challenging existing museum collection procedures, particularly focusing on how social media does not align with the Museum’s current collections management software. I show that the Museum treats social media as both an object (for example, collecting a single tweet) and as a collecting tool that democratises the voices of the collection (for example, collecting every tweet using a particular hashtag). This dual function adds to anthropological understandings of social media as both a social and a material form.