History or Memory? An exploration into social media’s ‘feed’

Has the internet changed who controls the past?

The museum, often used as an icon for history, is traditionally a government-controlled institution.

What is the difference between history and memory? 

I could cite dictionaries, academics, politicians and many others on the intricacies between these two terms, but at its core their separation can be defined in a word:

Power.

Memory is something we are all given as human beings. It is a part of our intrinsic ‘self’, and through communication becomes something we can share, albeit with its inconsistencies.

History, however, ‘is written by the victors’, as the saying goes. Not just anyone gets to ‘write’ history, the contents of its chapters are reserved for an exclusive club. There are far less inconsistencies to history compared to a shared memory: we know the cause, the effect. The good, the bad. The right, the wrong. The beautiful, the ugly. 

Or, at least, we know the writers’ perspectives of these. This has been known to lead to some issues in the past: the controlling of historical narratives is a powerful tool for propaganda - an example of which you can find in my previous article.

Photograph of Joseph Stalin before and after the image was doctored (Source)

Memory is owned by all, regardless of power. History is owned by those powerful enough to keep it for themselves.

But now we have social media. Anyone can post an artefact of an event, a time, a place, and have it preserved in a global forum for all to see. History is no longer reserved for this exclusive club, to decide the character roles of the past as they please. Now we can all display our version of events, we can all see the truth of the past for ourselves.

That was the idea of this whole internet thing, right? Is it just me, or does it feel like that isn’t quite happening currently?

Perhaps its previous owners aren’t solely responsible for history’s struggle to reflect the truth. Perhaps the very framework through which history is communicated also has its part to play.

History’s Framework

What is the framework of history? Narrative. 

All narratives share some core functions: beginning with a protagonist in a state of equilibrium, when suddenly a disruption occurs, usually by the antagonist. Our hero struggles, some helpers lost along the way. Maybe we see a twist, but in the end they prevail, finding meaning in their struggle through the lessons they learned on the journey.

We like narratives because of their drama. To create drama, we need conflict. These are key principles of storytelling. And it makes the story entertaining. 

This isn’t inherently bad, or evil, but it fails to accurately capture reality.

Hitler’s campaign of Nazism through World War II was inconceivably abhorrent, but does this excuse Churchill’s well-recorded colonialist ideology? 9/11 was too an immeasurable horror, but does this allow the United States to remain the ‘good guy’ despite its history of imperial occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan?

I, and most, would be inclined to say no, it does not justify this. But within the framework of history, we are only given two options: you’re the good guy, who writes the story, or you’re the bad guy, who proves how ‘good' the good guy really is.

The Feed

So, how does any of this relate to the ‘feed’ on Facebook or Twitter?

Narratives of history have traditionally been separated by nations: in wartime Britain and Germany during the 1940s, you would have found two very different narratives, and nations playing very different roles within them.

Social media has retained many of history’s narrative devices, but the divisions are not the same. We find, more and more, that these narratives are divided by ideology.

When you use social media, you interact with posts, pages, people. You like, comment, follow. And this influences the algorithm. We know this.

The algorithm then displays information in a certain order on your feed. These feeds loosely descend by reverse chronology, with the newest at the top and the oldest at the bottom, with some further filtering based on these increasingly complex algorithms.

All of a sudden, a story is created: a story that ever unfolds in the present, with a seemingly endless chronology of artefacts that explain reality through the lens of your interests and beliefs as a series of events that caused this moment. 

Just like the historical narrative, the linear, descending feed creates a consistent story of events that explains an individual’s specific ideology and the actors who are aligned to it as the protagonists in the epic that is reality, and any who aren’t aligned the antagonist.

The Result

The framework of the narrative will always exclude the ‘other’, the one who doesn’t get to write the story, but plays a central role. Meanwhile, they write their own story elsewhere, and the roles are reversed. 

Perhaps this goes some way to explain how, for the first time in history, it would appear that two different people won the US presidential election, despite the existence of substantial empirical evidence for who ‘truly’ won.

It is hard to blame social media platforms for this issue. They promote narratives because they entertain, and this was the original purpose of these platforms.

But perhaps we need a different framework, one which promotes the communication of collective memory, rather than the construction of historical narratives.

How do you remember? Do you scroll through a list of your life’s events to locate the memory you want? Or does it just appear, based on what you are doing right now? Maybe memory can inspire the next framework for a digital platform, rather than history.