It can actually just be a place you don’t go or a conversation you don’t participate in. And if not, it doesn’t have to loom like a storm cloud over your reality. So you can choose to step inside and become part of that conversation, whatever it is. There ought to be many websites, and they ought to have these little boundaries around them. It is a system, it is a place where people gathered and still gather, but it’s just one little, sort of less public square now, among many, many, many more. Like whenever anybody says that, whether it’s the current CEO, or some journalists writing about it, I hope everybody’s got the antibodies in their brain to say, “No, clearly not.” Because it makes the argument or recognizes the truth, that Twitter is just one little thing. I used to be able to go over and check it out and read and read and read. I’m not on Twitter anymore, but maybe I was curious to know what Whitney is getting up to. That change has been actually to lock it down, to make it much more difficult for people to access Twitter, just to search for a name, maybe their name, maybe a URL, maybe the title of a book, or even to look at people’s profiles. RS: I think a change that has happened to Twitter under its new administration that many people complain about is actually a healthy one for everyone else, for the body politic, for all the overlapping public squares that we have in this country and in this world. I’m curious what role you think Twitter can play this time around and how sharper political divisions in social media generally are affecting the spread of news and fake news and conspiracy theories, which seem to be a particular interest of yours. population gets its news from social media. Part of the display of American conspiracies in your fictional museum extends into the exabytes, which seems right to me. You had a short story in The Atlantic, “The Conspiracy Museum,” which I really enjoyed. I’m curious about your thoughts on all of the ways that Twitter has reinvented itself, some of which I think is for the worse, and can still affect politics. Ganeshananthan: So despite all this social media doomsday talk, as we’re mentioning here, Twitter is somehow not exactly dead yet. So I think, if indeed, cracks are forming in the ice, and suddenly we’re going to see a new flourishing of weird experiments and things that might work or not work, I am all for it. It’s Twitter and it’s Facebook and it’s Google. We just got locked in and we knew the dramatis personae of the internet of that period. And then something happened in the 2010s. Again, I was young, so everything was more fun and interesting, and everything was new.īut I really do believe it was healthier in a way that any ecosystem ought to kind of bubble and fizz and percolate. And it was a scene, it was a creative scene in all the ways that there can be a literary scene or a music scene-it was kind of a socio-technical scene. It was a ferment it really had a sense of percolation and fizz. And it was exciting to bop between them and see how they were different and what people were trying, and some of them failed very quickly. Now I’ll preface what I’m about to say with the self-awareness that I am now a sort of medium-old person, and I’m about to be like, “Back in the good old days…” But, for me, as both a user of these platforms and someone who was a little bit involved in this industry itself, there was this time in the middle to late 2000s when it seemed like there was something new every month. I think all these platforms have held on for a little too long. Robin Sloan: Well, I think it’s a healthy thing. Is this going to die? And if so, what does that mean? Whitney Terrell: I’ve noticed that my followers are going down, not up… I assume that represents people leaving the platform who used to have accounts and don’t anymore. This episode of the podcast was produced by Amanda Trout and Anne Kniggendorf. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.Ĭheck out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. Finally, he reads from his 2012 novel Mr. Sloan reflects on the role social media plays (or doesn’t) in authors’ careers, as well as his own decision to leave Twitter. The co-hosts and Sloan grapple with the unruliness of Twitter over time, political polarization on different platforms and the risks of disinformation, and what the end of Twitter-now rebranded as X-might look like. Ganeshananthan to talk about how Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter and the rise of new platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Meta’s Threads are shaping a new ecosystem of social media. Bestselling novelist and former Twitter employee Robin Sloan joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V.
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