The history of the 2018 elections will be told on the internet and through the internet. We urgently need methods to capture the incalculable amount of material generated in the candidates’ online battles.
For months, we received memes, shared posts, and followed accounts that captivated crowds, such as Ursal and Fascist Barbie on Instagram; we joined new closed Facebook groups, tracked new movements on Twitter, and, in recent weeks—how could we forget?—were all caught up in WhatsApp groups’ messaging “crusades.”
Where will all this material go? Who will preserve this memory?
We face a new phenomenon: the production of discourse and language emerging from every pore of society
We must safeguard the archive of memories of the 2018 elections, including fake news. They record how we experienced the most fratricidal elections in our recent history.
The United States Library of Congress has just launched a crowdsourcing project, crowd.loc.gov, aimed at transcribing and classifying materials in its collections to make them available online. It could be a good starting point for thinking about how to archive the history of our elections.
Crowdsourcing is a collaborative working method in which tasks are distributed to volunteers around a common goal. In my view, Wikipedia is the best example of what crowdsourcing represents.
I make this qualification because the term is often associated with dividing up tedious tasks nobody wants to do, in a kind of reinvention of slavery by capitalism 2.0, and that is not the focus here. The idea is to work with multitudes in the sense the Italian theorist Antonio Negri gives the term. These are not shapeless masses but intelligent collectives that unite around shared goals.
In the Library of Congress’s strategy, then, the aim is to create a new way of consolidating the collection through users’ input. But this is not done anarchically or randomly. A section was created on a metadata-sharing platform, along with a team that liaises with volunteers.
We must develop something similar to preserve the memory of the 2018 elections.
Transcript of Giselle Beiguelman’s Ouvir Imagens column, broadcast every Monday at 8 a.m. on Rádio USP (93.7).
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