Elon, Twitter And The Decline Of The Social Media Era
Diane Rehm: On My Mind
WAMU 88.5
4.7 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 18 November 2022
⏱️ 39 minutes
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Summary
It has been less than a month since Elon Musk officially took the reins at Twitter. In that short time, there have been mass layoffs, advertisers have pulled back on spending, and some of the platform’s most prominent users have threatened to leave.
But Twitter is not the only social media company experiencing upheaval. In the last year, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value and cut more than 10,000 jobs.
Diane spoke with Ian Bogost, director of the film and media studies program at Washington University in St. Louis and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. In a recent essay Bogost asks if the age of social media is ending, and explains why he thinks that might not be such a bad thing.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, it's Diane. On my mind, what the Twitter meltdown says about the status social media. |
| 0:14.0 | Since Elon Musk took over the company last month, we've seen mass layoffs. Advertisers |
| 0:21.6 | had pulled spending and some of the platform's most prominent users have threatened to leave. |
| 0:29.6 | But Twitter isn't the only social media company experiencing upheaval. Over the past year, |
| 0:38.6 | Mark Zuckerberg's meta has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value and cut 11,000 jobs. |
| 0:48.6 | Diane Bogost is director of the Filman Media Studies program at Washington University in St. Louis. |
| 0:57.6 | He's also contributing writer at the Atlantic. In a recent essay, he asks if the age of social media is ending. |
| 1:09.6 | And he joined me to explain why he thinks that might not be a bad thing. |
| 1:16.6 | In Let's Start With Twitter, Elon Musk took over. And since then things have gotten really, really messy. |
| 1:26.6 | How much trouble is the company in right now? |
| 1:31.6 | It's hard to tell, but it looks bad. The first thing that Musk did was to lay off half the company. |
| 1:38.6 | And that process has continued. |
| 1:41.6 | The thing about these services is they're not just like Microsoft Word or something. |
| 1:47.6 | They're these kind of big machines that need people to keep them running. |
| 1:51.6 | So some are worried that the whole thing is just going to fall apart. |
| 1:56.6 | And you see some Twitter power users even disbanding for other platforms trying to export or retrieve their connections and contacts, |
| 2:06.6 | deleting their direct messages for fear that they'll be read by rogue agents. That sort of thing. |
| 2:13.6 | What about his laying off all those people? Surely that's not doing the company any good? |
| 2:22.6 | It's true. The service seems to have started to sputter a bit. Some of you noticed that things are breaking. |
| 2:29.6 | If you log out, maybe you can't log back in. That said, Twitter hasn't been a business that's been as successful as its competitors as Facebook and others. |
| 2:41.6 | And so there's probably some justification for revisiting the business fundamentals. |
| 2:47.6 | But of course, Musk has gotten himself into this situation where he bought Twitter for $40 plus billion, much of it debt financed, |
... |
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