Bix dot Blog

Matthew Bogart touches on differences in getting to know people on bulletin boards versus doing the same on Twitter, and I think that part of the obstacle is that “a community like Twitter” is a phrase that makes no sense. Twitter isn’t a community, although it likely manages to contain various communities which form despite the platform’s actual disinterest in community. The more I think about it, I believe that social media platforms exist at a scale that’s perhaps inherently hostile to hosting community. One of the things that happened in the earlier era of social networking is that communities formed in groups or chats, virtual places you had to reach out to, or for; in the current era of social media it’s all about that single, solitary jumble of a feed. Fundamentally, I don’t think the feed as an organizing principle is compatible with community.