It’s a long-overdue decision, and one that takes into account of a host of wider changes offline as well as online, 14 years and 35 days after setting up my first account.
Above – that’s me locking up on the site formerly known as Twitter.
I have no plans for posting any new content or using it as a conversational platform. I’m not going to dwell on the inflammatory posts by its owner, or the people and firms that stumped up the cash for its takeover, or the wider global structures that have resulted in where we are today.
Social media declining in the face of anti-social media
With the gaming of algorithms and the skewed financial incentives, the owners of the sites have created a toxic ecosystem that does the opposite of what *social* media (emphasis on the former word) is meant to do going by its definition: it’s meant to be ‘pro-social’. And ‘Social’ is meant to imply groups of individuals getting on with each other and having productive, constructive, and consensual exchanges.
The ability for people with multiple shared interests to find each other, engage with each other, and form online communities from wherever they were in the world was one of the great things to emerge in the early years of social media. Both inside and outside of the civil service I turned up and organised events where I met people I had been exchanging public messages with for a long time online, for the first time in person. At one such gathering I in the early 2010s I remember being struck by how the conversations in a north London pub were carrying on as if we had all known each other for years. (Even though the only thing that had brought us together was a cuddly dragon called Puffles).
I remember experiencing similar in the months leading up to my departure from the civil service, saying to a number of people at a social gathering near my old office (from which the UKGovCamp network emerged) that ‘this is what the civil service Fast Stream should have been like’. The difference being that with the Fast Stream the recruitment paths and branding inevitably attracted and disproportionately recruited people from affluent backgrounds (i.e. it was not representative of the society that the civil service is meant to serve) and who were attracted to/by the various things that working in close proximity to ministers brought.
The UKGovCamp network emerged out of a grassroots movement of people who wanted to use the new technological and social developments of social media for public good, and didn’t have an exam or assessment centre to pass before getting involved. It was the passion of the people that drove the collective – and that’s not something that you can artificially generate or sustain for extended periods of time. Not without pissing off a lot of people anyway.
The gaming of the algorithms also affected how I used social media – and my behaviour too, although it was hard to see at the time
I still beat myself up over this because I lost too many good people as a result. But when you suddenly find yourself disabled, immobile, and isolated having previously been something of a social butterfly, when someone or something compounds this by reducing your ability to interact with people (eg by reducing the likelihood that your posts will be seen by your online social groups) subconsciously you become that little bit more desperate to be heard. So you post more, and more, to the extent that it becomes annoying to other people and you end up being muted or blocked.
Combine that with a struggle to remain relevant as life – and people move on. And technology moves on too. I remember one discussion from the early 2010s about the emergence of new technologies. If they emerge before a person is born, then it’s as if the technology has always been there. They cannot imagine a world without it. If it emerges between say late primary school and late-20s, it’s a new and exciting thing that many take to like a duck to water. And if it emerges beyond your late 30s, then it can become this frightening and dangerous thing that either does not make sense or requires too much effort to figure out. I didn’t realise how significant that last point would become until my early 40s – trying to figure out VR and AI.
Bluesky as the safe space for the early Twitter generation in an era
In terms of the speed of technological change, I recalled this post by Sophie Smith-Galer on the rise of Bluesky within the established/mainstream media, where she compared it with the growing trend of video clips.
“The rush to Bluesky is happening partly because of a media yearning to cling to a form of social media that suited them, and not their audiences. By all means try it out – I am, and you can find me on there as well as Threads – but don’t use it again at the expense of trying out a video platform that’s going to futureproof you and reach audiences a lot more successfully.”
Sophie Smith Galer Dec 2024 here
I can’t pretend to be this young dynamic chap that I sort of thought myself of as being in my mid-20s a generation ago
In hindsight I have been too unwilling to move on from something even though I should have moved on long before. I’m not a ‘quit while you’re ahead’ type of person – in part because of my anxiety disorder vs the comfort blanket of whatever was there, even if it was shrinking/declining and was never going to be sustainable in the longer term.
Back in January 2016 – nine years ago now, I made the effort to become more comfortable speaking into camera. It followed from one of the first prominent UK vloggers – Rosianna Halse Rojas (whose YT page started in 2006!), who in the early-mid 2010s produced a series of daily vlogposts for a single month irrespective of what was happening in her life at the time. So I tried the same thing – daily blogposts for a month under the series theme Vloguary 2016. (Trust me, it’s easier said than done!) What I didn’t know at the time was that I was suffering from CFS/ME nor did I know the first thing about ADHD or ADHD-related burnout. Had I known about either a quarter of a century ago, I would have taken a very different set of turns in life.
Today I no longer have the mental stamina to do anything like that. I don’t have the mental stamina to do much anyway these days. Hence having to cut back significantly on the things I get involved in, as well as getting used to the idea of not feeling the need to respond to everyone being wrong on the internet. That’s come from recognising where that need/desire comes from in terms of how my brain is wired. I’ve gotten better at asking myself earlier on in the thought process of whether this is my ADHD-mind speaking, and if it is, do I need to type and press ‘send’? More often than not, the answer is ‘No’.
At the same time, there are far fewer people to engage with on issues that are more-and-more local and ‘parochial’ in the grand scheme of things. No one outside of Cambridgeshire really cares about Cambridge’s transport problems. Why should they? At the same time, the conversations have kept on going around in circles. There comes a time when you get bored of your own content because it’s the same as what you had posted earlier, only the political institutions carry on as normal. Or rather did until the most recent general election where I now find myself with a useful back catalogue of stuff to refer to, but not need to retype.
Now, imagine saying the following in a TV advertising voice-over style:
*I have seen the future, and it’s interactive!*
What the big SocMed firms seem to have done is forgotten about the importance of the ‘social’ bit. Accordingly, when it comes to the Government’s devolution policies and people shaping their local areas, the SocMed firms have made it almost impossible for state institutions to make it worthwhile using their platforms in the way they might have done a decade ago – eg crowd-sourcing questions. I can’t think of a platform today that a local council could use to crowdsource online some serious responses and ideas regarding a specific local issue. (i.e. not for an annual report or formal consultation on a planning application).
Trying to figure out where I fit in (and if I fit in) to an expanding city with shrinking communities
The number of people active in local democracy feels much smaller now than just over a decade ago, when both councillors and officers were much more prominent – and commentators and the public were also much more visible. There were very few people who were completely anonymous locally, even though we might have had what I call ‘nom-de-guerres’ or avatars online – mainly to deal with abuse. That’s not there anymore – and I don’t blame them given the current environment.
Also, I’m an immobile middle-aged person who cannot get to all of the events and meetings that I might have done a generation ago under my own steam. Hence having to turn inwards and look at things locally (which are not great) while trying to make use of some of the few new spaces that have been created by others – eg Stir Cafe’s new venue on Cherry Hinton Road – the Queen Edith’s and Coleridge boundary. It’s a harder sell doing things face-to-face, but until the social media world can come up with something better than the toxic environment we currently face, people and institutions might have to go back to old-skool methods of community action. Hence I’m starting small on Sunday 12 Jan 2025 from 2:30pm with what will be a small, informal gathering for anyone local to Stir Cafe on the Old Swiss Site who wants to chat about, and find out more about the future of our city and what it might mean for us. Furthermore, it’s something I will be repeating on a fortnightly basis. (Just don’t ask me to buy the coffees for everyone!)
If you are interested in the longer term future of Cambridge, and on what happens at the local democracy meetings where decisions are made, feel free to:
- Follow me on BSky <- A critical mass of public policy people seem to have moved here (and we could do with more local Cambridge/Cambs people on there!)
- Like my Facebook page
- Consider a small donation to help fund my continued research and reporting on local democracy in and around Cambridge.
Below: Sun 12 Jan 2025, 2:30pm, Stir Cafe Cherry Hinton Road, Cambridge. On the future of Cambridge
The Cambridge Town Owl 