Happy New Year!
I’m currently writing some text about a potential gap in public sector digital strategy, questioning what I see as increasingly successful but increasingly commercialised and packaged social media platforms, apparently dominating our lives and our devices. In GLAMs we’ve enthusiastically adopted many of these, from the early days of Del.icio.us through Flickr and Vine and now to Storify.
Jo Fell recently posted a useful MCG query about the closure of Storify and what to do next, and other list members came up with some alternatives; but Mike Ellis came up with the obvious long-term, relatively nuke-proof intervention. He suggested, as GLAMs, we could and maybe should be setting up local hosting as a long-term legacy measure. (It’s the Battlestar Galactica option, if you are a sci-fi fan!)
But this is not just about social media apps and tools. More importantly, Facebook is spawning ever-larger audiences within their closed content network, at the same time as building giant income streams and – maybe – locking those audiences into the platform. What are the consequences for cultural heritage organisations, with long-standing values around scholarship, archive policy and educational connectivity in this context?
Clearly we may well want to use event listings on FB and to trail shows and content; but does the apparently unstoppable tide of people moving from the old vanilla web to the world of Snapchat, Pinterest and FB mean that monolithic websites are now endangered?
I would like to hear from people working at funder and stakeholder level, and from arts and heritage organisations who might now be considering the need to develop digital forms that fit within the Facebook environment. WikiMedia is an obvious example of a more benign mass environment, so are you considering that, too?
Is the only alternative to stay ‘outside’ that FB environment and risk isolation from mass audiences? Where does investing in Linked Open Data fit into this? Is LoD compatible with FB APIs?
All pointers and research tips appreciated…
Jon
Jon Pratty, FRSA
[log in to unmask]
University of Sussex
07739287392
@jon_pratty
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-pratty-0855074/
Sent from Mail for Windows 10
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