Words on the screen – the rise and (relative) fall of text-based social media: why journalists and lawyers on social media may not feel so special again
Early-ish blogging, I can recall with a shudder, required you to code with HTML. You had to physically type in hyperlinks with <a> tags and so on.
As Marie Le Conte set out in a thought-provoking and insightful post on her Substack, this had the effect of lots of text-based social media users – writers and journalists – believing that social media was about them:
And what she says about journalists can also be said about lawyers: the stuff of lawyering, like the stuff of journalism, is words.
“Words! Words! Words! I’m so sick of words! I get words all day through; First from him, now from you! Is that all you blighters can do?”
Just as HTML-based blogging eased into WYSIWYG social media typing, it is becoming just as easy for a social user to make and edit video and audio.
This, coupled with the wayward way Twitter has gone (and so has been quit by many), means that the great days of text-based social users thinking they were special are perhaps over.
