Member-only story
Networked Publics: Social Media Shifts
Digital town halls, like X & Facebook are changing. There’s a social media shift underway. That actually might be good. Here’s why.
Markets, town squares, public spaces, they have played such a vital role in our societies for thousands of years since we started building cities. These evolved to include digital spaces as the internet became more pervasive in society. From the early days of social media such as blogs and MySpace to then Facebook and Twitter (now X). But these digital town halls are changing.
It’s not just that these more public town halls are facing an exodus, it is that power dynamics are changing, social structures, means of trust in one another and perhaps most importantly, how ideas flow through our societies.
In a time when many feel overwhelmed with geopolitical shifts and the rise of authoritarian and populist leaders, when people are increasingly losing trust in those digital town halls, people are retreating to more closed spaces. That’s not all bad. Or good.
This loss of any meaningful public digital town hall makes it harder to have a sense of the public transcript of societies, making it more difficult to understand broader social currents. In some ways, this can, and has, lead to more…
