Twitter Is Dead; Long Live Twitter

Here is an article I don’t need to read again: a professor or teacher polls their classroom, discovers the students don’t use a social media network or a software application anymore, and then predicts the death of said platform.

“I checked with my kids and Twitter is no longer cool.”

This is not student-involved or forward-looking teaching; it’s passive aggression. The author sounds both defeated and cynical. Instead of the greatly exaggerated obituary, social media has fostered the “we can only hope epitaph.”

As someone teaching Millennials about the Web, I understand the degree to which the Internet has made teachers into students and vice versa. With the environment constantly innovating, experience just doesn’t mean as much anymore. I’ve already written about how I don’t teach best practices. A recent New Yorker article illustrated something even more tangible: wisdom just doesn’t make the salary it once did.

This doesn’t mean we throw out the education system, or the Web. The rise of innovation over prescribed method is a positive change. If I can no longer default to formula, then neither can my students. Everyone has more to learn.

Many of my students, despite growing up online, have little idea of the Internet’s history, or the history of communications and media before. Some have never heard of Netscape or the Deep Web or Richard Dawkins’ original definition for “meme.” Others use social media in the same poor ways their friends do. Twenty-five years into the Web, a twenty-year-old is just as likely as a forty-year-old to share a five-year-old meme as news.

There’s no such thing as an Internet expert. The Web is too vast in its escalating discovery and transformation.

For example, let’s look at how Twitter is not dying.

Recently, Twitter announced it was taking another one of the many ways its users improvise with the platform and changing their software to support and endorse the new method. They did this previously with retweets and @replies. Now they’re adding “threads.”

For years, Twitter users have used tweets to write monologues as well as carry on conversations, make single statements, or promote headlines. When someone posted a passionate succession of tweets, it was called a “tweetstorm.” Then they started using the reply option to reply to themselves and thread their monologues of tweets together under a lead tweet.

Threading tweets together might sound the same as longform blogging or simply writing an article, but Twitter threads are still made of tweets on the Twitter platform. They are longform pieces that interact with the Twitter audience in their unique way.

In my book, The Interactive Voice, I discuss how Twitter is the best online platform for teaching and reinforcing basic writing skills because it forces students to edit for clarity, to publish, and take feedback.

I also discuss how the Twitter platform has made writing more interactive. If someone tweets your article, they may quote your headline or your major idea, but they also might tweet and quote other parts of your work. Twitter has made longform writing more quotable than ever before.

Now with threading, there is the incentive to write entire articles and essays in which each sentence has the craft and power to foster—and become annotated by—its own debate. Twitter threads represent another challenging assignment for my class and possibly the most dynamic form of writing the Internet has created yet.

How could Twitter be dead?

Twitter is still being born.