Does Twitter's Decline Mean The End Of The Global Town Square? | #SocialMedia  | Distance Learning, mLearning, Digital Education, Technology | Scoop.it

Twitter has long positioned itself as the “global town square” in which the world comes together to have a shared conversation across geographic and cultural boundaries. Such was the early vision of last decade's social platforms, that they would bring us together as a society and overcome the ability of elites to dictate the global conversation. Instead, even as Twitter’s CEO touted his company’s global reach in 2013, the platform’s growth had leveled off and over the half-decade since, Twitter has shrunk almost in half, shed its vaunted geotagged resolution, centralized around an ever-older set of elite accounts and transitioned from a place to hear from the world to a place to retweet from afar. What does this mean for the future of the global town square?

The great dream of social media was that it would give everyone a voice. From heads of state to ordinary citizens, everyone, no matter where they lived, what they looked like, what their background or place in society was, would be equal. Most importantly, these social platforms would be free to publish to and consume and would not preference the wealthy and powerful over the traditionally disenfranchised.

Elites would no longer control the global conversation. We would finally have our long-elusive vision of communicative democracy.

 

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https://www.scoop.it/t/social-media-and-its-influence/?&tag=Twitter

 


Via Gust MEES