Archiving is more than just saving.The social nature of digital archives.

The spread of platforms for the sharing and self-promotion of projects and designers, together with the populist drift of social networks (Irace, 2013), bring to the surface the limits and potential of the field constituted by Social Computing (Manovich, 2005) and Digital Humanities, offering hypothetical scenarios to the crisis of traditional archives. The hybridization between archival and sharing platforms seems to be a strategic tool to allow not only the sharing but also the protection, and therefore the rescue, of digital artefacts, in order to preserve them from the programmed obsolescence to which virtual systems and technologies are subjected. The contribution intends to survey experiences involving the hybridisation of different types of platforms, in order to understand to what extent the use of IT tools can facilitate the interconnection between visual artefacts, the ways in which this takes place and to initiate a critical reflection in order to better understand if and how these platforms can become tools for the protection and also the dissemination of graphic culture.