"X isn’t the old Twitter anymore. Bluesky, Threads, and Mastodon don’t yet fill the old Twitter niche either. But at this point, staying on Twitter because there’s no replacement is a bit like saying “I still drive my old gas guzzler because I can’t afford a new car,” when the old gas guzzler is missing a tire and the steering wheel. …Dude, accept it. You just don’t have a car anymore."
“That raises an awkward question. What if globalisation, far from promoting democracy in China, undermined democracy in the US? It would be an amusing historical irony — if we were not living with the consequences.”
Definitely seeing a larger than usual number of academic follows in the past few days. Hi everyone!
A lot of them seem to be from folks who have joined for a while but who have been mostly quiet. Not sure if this is related to the "X" debacle, problems at other sites (BlueSky, Threads, etc) or just wanting to try again.
Nothing beats peer-reviewing an article and coming face-to-face with the fact that entire, sustained, years-long arguments that colleagues were having / making not even a decade ago have been entirely forgotten or where never noticed at all! This is why I am sanguine about the hurly-burly of academic life. Soon we will all be lost to time ...
“My CD single reviews are no great loss to posterity – but vast swathes of 21st-century music criticism are now literally unreadable. Every dead link on the reviews’ aggregator Metacritic tells a story of neglect.”
“The user migration from Twitter to Mastodon that followed Elon Musk's purchase of the Blue Bird site represents one of the largest digital migrations in the history of the Social Web and it is one rare examples of collective behavioral change that is documented through large-scale digital traces.”
An interesting and entirely unscientific data point today: my largely European journalism and political communication masters students today said they got most of their news from Instagram by following individual journalists directly.