Social media, as everyone knows, is the cause of all social problems because otherwise society wouldn’t have any problems. The Easter Bunny is a socialist plot. Elon Musk is generally loathed and admired.
Excuse this over-detailed analysis of global media trends. They’re so exciting. …But why in the name of media macros would Musk want to own Twitter? On paper, it doesn’t look like a particularly good deal in terms of revenue. He’s made a ballpark median offer based on historical prices over the last 5 years. $43 billion is a lot of cupcakes to pay for the world’s tantrums.
Twitter could be quite a nuisance for Musk. It’s a very high-maintenance business on a second-by-second basis. Musk does apparently do other things apart from pondering the fate of social media, and that could be very time-consuming. There’s an odd side to this situation, though.
Twitter, for all its many fully justified criticisms, is a virtual real-time barometer of global issues. It’s the 24/7 Big Data abbreviated equivalent of Reddit, just not as well indexed. It is a place for current news, reliable or otherwise. It’s the equivalent of the world talking in its sleep or in its higher levels of paranoia, depending on how you see it.
However – The alternate argument is that Twitter needs direction, not existing simply just to “be Twitter” as a working dynamic. Twitter was also arguably the key element in de-mythologizing social media, showing it for what it really was and still is. The drama and turgidity of Twitter tell a very simple tale.
These are also arguably the most dangerous times in human history. The environment is crashing, as usual. Some nut is threatening nuclear war. Societies barely exist. Human fertility is nosediving. Resources like water are drying up. If you want to make a cup of tea, you can just dunk your cup in the ocean and chuck in a teabag. One of those folksy mass extinctions is trundling around. Crime is doing nicely, (thanks for caring) and corruption is now the way things are done.
(Just as a matter of interest – Does anyone remember “nice”? It was around here somewhere…)
It’s the karmic payback for all that crappy dystopian spam, in effect. Twitter is the moving image of this mess. …So someone now wants to take over the global media drainage system?
So – Is Musk being expensively naïve?
Musk has explained this move to some extent. “Unlocking Twitter’s potential for free speech”, however, comes with some caveats and a lot of risks. What, more Trump? More QAnon? That’s not free speech or anything like it, never has been, and never will be. It’s scripted spin, and nothing but programmed, and usually delivered by bots, anyway. It’s about as “free” as a jail. It’s fascist fodder, plain and simple.
Naivete isn’t a word commonly associated with Musk. He may have a vision. Ah, um… The trouble with visionaries is that they often think others actually share their vision. Sometimes they even think people understand it. More likely they’ll exploit it.
That too-large vision could be a huge mistake in this case. American politics and rabies have only two defining differences – Rabies is curable and at least credible. Add to this wholesome disaster area the international mix of that-there effervescent young Vlad Putin, INFEKTION, and the likely future inputs of Santa Xi and his Fluffy Wolf Warriors, and what’s to buy?
You wouldn’t think it would be possible to physically buy the world’s worries, but this is pretty close. The First Amendment is one of the most advanced bits of human literature ever invented; it doesn’t need that much help, though. One of the beauties of free speech is you can ignore the babble, rather than get buried under it.
Little Donny aged nearly two and a quarter, Vladikins, Uncle Xi, and the rest of the plague carriers can wait. Preferably forever.
Better options? Oh, yeah, and plenty of them.
Twitter can and should upgrade itself into something much less like a storm drain. It needs better categorization and indexing to make marketing findable. You can use those gigantic blank sidebars for advertising and maybe some real “Twitter deals” or some other staggeringly brilliant innovation.
(Templates be damned. They used to be organizational; now they’re straitjackets for decent layout and looking very dated. There used to be click and drag sites where you could organize the info the way you wanted in the 90s. How symmetrical does a site have to be before it bores you to death?)
You could also easily integrate Twitter into information about new tech, new media, quite literally ad Infinitum. Where do you find whenever you want about Netflix, VR, gaming, sports, fashion… add dictionary here? …Twitter, obviously. Integrate with Twitter marketing for deals, etc. A no-brainer? Yes.
It’s understandable that Twitter hasn’t really changed much in years. It’s a massive data load, people are always super-busy. You don’t rebuild the bus while you’re driving it. So the model is carrying a load for which it wasn’t really designed. That can be drastically improved. I’m sure just about everyone working at Twitter has more than a few ideas.
The moving hand Tweets, and having Twote, moves on. So should Twitter. If someone can crank up the values, fine. Just let’s not have an unquantifiable abstract as the working model. It never works.
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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
