Preserving community imaginaries in the age of platforms (slutseminarium med opponent Isto Huvila). Shirley Chan

The present thesis aims to elucidate how social media platforms and online communities challenge preservation and their implications for capturing and preserving community imaginaries. The thesis focuses on how the platform environments in which the communities reside raise questions and challenge components of long-term preservation, raising questions concerning creatorship, representation and context. The study employs an ethnographic sensibility in its methods and a theoretical entry point anchored in an infrastructural understanding. It focuses on two fan communities, Reddit and Tumblr, surrounding the multimedia franchise Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). The study contributes to the knowledge of the challenges in preserving community imaginaries emerging in settings permeated with platform logic and how this logic contributes to shaping contemporary information infrastructures, impacting societal structures of remembering and forgetting, and shaping access and use of information today and in the future.