But there’s still a low-grade urgency to save our social media for posterity — and it’s particularly urgent in cases in which social media itself had a profound influence on historic events. Tumblr and even Twitter may eventually end up ancient internet history because of their financial instability. Social media is as essential to understanding the preoccupations and temperature of our time as Haring’s notebooks were for his. Rhizome, an arts nonprofit group, built a tool called Webrecorder to save parts of today’s internet for future generations. Building an archive has always required asking a couple of simple but thorny questions: What will we save and how?

Source: New York Times June 21, 2016 10:52 UTC