Nostalgic for Twitter of the past

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I’m a huge fan of Twitter. I love it enough that I wrote an ebook about how to get started with it. I use it as a learning tool. I connect with amazing people on the platform, and I have made some wonderful friends along the way.

But recently I’ve struggled to stay engaged. It seems that anger is ever present. Fear is a persistent theme. Teachers with limited resources are asking others to help #clearthelist of teaching resources and items they want others to purchase for them on Amazon. I can’t even begin to talk about the vile that surfaces in political tweets.

I’m lucky that I’ve taken the time to create a great Twitter List of people I most enjoy conversing with and learning from. This reduces the distractions of things I don’t enjoy. But I just can’t help but wonder where tools like Twitter are heading, compared to where it came from?

Beyond sticking to my closed list, and ignoring the rest, I’m not sure how I will engage with Twitter going forward? I used to use it to fill me in on news, but the things that trend upward seem too negative. I used to go to my timeline to find engaging articles to read, now I spend more time editing my choices to focus on, rather than actually reading any links.

Maybe I lived in a safe bubble in the early days of Twitter, shielded from everything except my interests in education and learning? Maybe I allowed too much in? Maybe the tool itself is inviting the wrong kind of engagement? Maybe it’s time to take another break?

The Twitter of old was a really special place, and after spending some time on the tool this morning, I’m feeling nostalgic about what it used to mean to me.

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2 thoughts on “Nostalgic for Twitter of the past”

  1. Aaron Davis

    I too have written about this sense of nostalgia.

    I do not regret that time, but it is not necessarily something that I miss. My fast food social media diet has been replaced by one managed around blogs, feeds and comments. I do sometimes feel I miss out on some things, but trust that if I need to know something that I will probably capture through some other means.

    Ian Guest, who wrote a PhD on the topic, kindly left me with this response, which I will share with you:

    A couple of hypotheticals I’ll throw into the pot to see what bubbles to the surface.
    1. What would happen (for you) if Twitter’s ‘fail whale’ reappeared tomorrow and suddenly Twitter was gone?
    2. What if you deactivated your original account and started afresh? Knowing what you know and bearing in mind what you wrote in this post, how would you do things differently, if at all? Is ‘making Twitter great again’ within your capacity?
    3. If Twitter is broken beyond repair and neither Mastodon nor micro.blog quite cut it, if you had the wherewithall, what would you design as a replacement? What would it need to have or be able to do?

    Thankfully there are some people still out there blogging.

    1. datruss

      Two thoughts come to mind Aaron:
      1. I need to re-engage with blogs again, with intention to converse as well as read.
      2. I need to make Twitter work for me, rather than waxing poetically about what it once was.

      Thanks for the inspiration!

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