Our Social History

If you are familiar with the late-night talk and news satire show Last Week Tonight hosted by comedian John Oliver you may have seen a bit titled “How is this still a thing” where he questions whether certain practices or ideas have outlived their usefulness, like Daylight Saving Time or celebrating Columbus Day. A similar query came to mind when I explored the social media emulator tool Fakebook: How did this become a thing?

Fakebook is exactly what it sounds like, a tool that lets you set up a fake Facebook profile, complete with personal information, posts and even friends. The intent of the site is made clear in that it allows teachers and students to create imaginary profile pages for study purposes, but why? Obviously, the existence of fakebook is predicated on the actual Facebook but it still begs the question as to why a study aid would be built on the basis of a social media platform. That we would have a tool to retell historical or even fictional events through a social media platforms says a lot about how we as a culture chronicle our history.

Ryan Taylor recently blogged about Allwyn Collinson’s six-year history project to recreate the events of World War II in real-time through Twitter. It’s a fascinating concept and one that has undoubtedly made knowledge of these events more widely known. A check of @RealTimeWWII’s Twitter profile boasts an impressive following with 515,000 followers.

Both of these examples seem to validate the concept that Marshall McLuhan put forth back in 1964 with his famous quote, “The medium is the message.”  The below video from the BBC Radio 4 gives a quick primer on the subject in under 2 minutes.  In his book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McLuhan makes the argument that throughout history, what has been communicated is less important than how it has been communicated and that the technology used to transmit the message has had a transformative effect on society.

I think this idea that the medium is not something neutral, that it does something to people, is much more profound in the age of social media. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. have made an undeniable impression on us and how we define our history. These are no longer individual histories but social ones. Through these social media lenses, my history is equal parts my own experience and your collective reaction to my experience. The instinct to record our history has always been there. Cavemen painted their stories on the walls. Today, our stories are written in the photos and status updates posted to our Facebook walls, and we invite others to participate in writing those stories.


McLuhan, M., & Lapham, L. H. (1994). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Reprint edition). Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.