Really interesting post Dave. I have been thinking a lot about Twitter lately. Like Stewart Riddle, I have concerns about you describe as the ‘rise of the jerks’. Yet, as you touch upon, there are still good people able to connect on Twitter. For some the answer is owning your own domain, while for others it is decentralised networks. However, Ian Guest challenged me with three questions:

What would happen (for you) if Twitter’s ‘fail whale’ reappeared tomorrow and suddenly Twitter was gone?
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?
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?

Along with your focus on working with people and problems, you have left me wondering what next. I wonder if post-digital is a time of ‘informed consent‘? Or maybe George Seimens suggests it is about ‘being’ skills?? Or maybe the ‘answer’ is having this conversation in the first place? Surely it is only through conversation that we are able to throw off the yoke of digital dogma? I feel that this is what Douglas Rushkoff’s book Team Human attempts.

Also on: Read Write Collect