For any artist who is active on the internet and/or social media and/or thinks they ought to be, I have a recommendation for an article which I think is a “must read”.
The Age of Social Media Is Ending is by Ian Bogost and it’s the first article that I’ve read which makes cogent sense of the last 20 years and how both the internet communication, social networks and social media have developed – and now appear to be declining.
It may well make you pause for thought about how you might proceed in future. At any rate it provides context for the future – as well as the past.
It’s over. Facebook is in decline, Twitter in chaos. Mark Zuckerberg’s empire has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value and laid off 11,000 people, with its ad business in peril and its metaverse fantasy in irons. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has caused advertisers to pull spending and power users to shun the platform (or at least to tweet a lot about doing so). It’s never felt more plausible that the age of social media might end—and soon.
Introduction to The Age of Social Media Is Ending is by Ian Bogost
You can find the article online in The Atlantic Magazine (which I recommend in general anyway!)
In terms of whether it’s written by somebody who knows what they’re talking about
Ian Bogost is an American academic and video game designer. He holds a joint professorship at Washington University as director and professor of the Film and Media Studies program in Arts & Sciences and the McKelvey School of Engineering. He previously held a joint professorship in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication and in Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts Distinguished Chair in Media Studies Wikipedia
