"A lot has happened on Facebook since you last logged in": Speculations about the long-term fate of social media

A decade ago, the locus of activity for our personal stuff (our photos, email, videos, documents, and the like) was on our personal computers. Now the situation is different. Not only is media born-digital, it also lives its entire life online. And while we may have some digital belongings we expect to keep to ourselves, what we share is also what we tend to save. Evidence supports the finding that we’d like to keep what we have just where we put it, not necessarily in an integrated personal archive, especially not one we’d have to curate ourselves. At the same time, people have expressed some squeamishness about institutional archiving efforts, especially when they address social media. I’ll bring together the results of several different recent studies to raise some questions about the long-term fate of social media.