It’s been about 2-weeks or so since the protests first started, and if you’re on social media, you’ve seen raw images of the protests and how it’s unfolding. Some days you see police pushing an older man with his cane down to the ground, and other days you see teargas sprayed directly on protestors.
Typically, these images would be broadcasted directly from the press who have access to these types of scenes to broadcast. However, these days you can see an unfiltered view of the protest instantly from people that are there.
In a matter of minutes, you can record a video and quickly upload it to your social media channel for the world to see. It’s so fast that even your traditional media sites can’t keep up and often reference other people’s tweets or posts in an article.
We all know this and even second nature. We all expect to share media online quickly. However, it’s unbelievable how powerful this is when you want to hold a police officer accountable.
This type of access to information globally led to the creation of apps like Citizen. The Citizen app allows users to upload information and alert their community of any critical events such as crimes, robbery, protests, and traffic jams. The protest coverage on Citizen app is fantastic because it shows you the location and simple timelines and description of the events that are taking place with a video. This app is not just a great companion for the protest, but your life in general.
Overall, social media and technology have allowed people to provide direct content straight from the source vs. consuming filtered information from CNN or Fox. I rather get my information directly instead of a media site spinning a story to get their ratings up. People do not think about media ratings in times of sharing critical videos and events. The protestors recording their videos are doing it to spread awareness amongst their friends and followers of what is truly happening.
What if there was a way to collect all the videos and pictures of the events on social media to re-enact the full view and all of the perspectives?
If I were a history teacher in the year 2040 and wanted to take my students back to the 2020 protests, I would not use a textbook. I would go through Twitter and Instagram to share the raw footage directly from multiple protestors to give a diverse view of the different sentiments that were occurring at the time.
Social media has effectively become a history textbook for future students to learn from the past.
I don’t know if this is true, but it would be incredible for Twitter and Instagram to hire historians to dive through the archives of what twitter has to document and organize history.
There is so much rich data, but it requires a lot of cleaning and organization but would be an incredible way of sorting through all the content and creating a piece of history. You can put together footage, tweets, posts, articles, and videos from a specific date, times, and locations to relive them through your computer or even virtual reality.
You can transport back in time and see firsthand what people were saying and feeling during these times.
Now imagine how engaging that history lesson would be for your students. 8th graders in 2040 can feel like they are marching right beside people during the racial protests of 2020.
I would love to see a history feature on Twitter or Instagram and comb through events that occurred in the past vs. reading about them on Wikipedia.
I know there’s already a search feature and a filter where you can look for these events. Still, it would be fantastic to have certain critical moments in history like major protests, wars, and pandemics further organized and optimized so you can relive them instead of filtering the gold from the garbage.
These technology companies have the technical prowess to go through the data to piece together pivotal moments in history. I hope generations in the future see history from the lens of millions of people vs. the press. I hope they see history for what it was. Lastly, I hope they never see history through a textbook.