I signed up for Twitter in November 2006. My friends were talking about it, and it seemed like a fun diversion. My first blog post suggesting Twitter might not be as good as it used to be is dated December 2006. Back in those early days, the service I remember sat at the centre of … Continue reading What’s on your mind? How I’m thinking about microblogging right now
From time to time I like to indulge in crazy counter-factual history. How different things might have been had social media been invented a few hundred years ago! What if Samuel Adams and his Bostonian compatriots had mobile phones to video their protests against the Tea Act. They might have led to more dramatic results. … Continue reading What if…
A few weeks ago there was a "Twitter Makes Us Better People" meme doing the rounds. It reminded me why I'm suspicious of claims about technology changing behaviour. In particular some social media evangelists seem to appropriate the language of radical politics to describe the alleged impact of Facebook, Twitter and the rest in some … Continue reading One song to the tune of another: the 18th Century prophet of social media revealed
The words of radical orator and writer John Thelwall, 1796: "The fact is that the hideous accumulation of capital in a few hands, like all diseases not absolutely mortal, carries, in its own enormity, the seeds of a cure. Man is, by his very nature, social and communicative - proud to display the little knowledge … Continue reading “Whatever presses men together…”
Matt Edgar writes here 