My First Piece About Social Media: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Abstract

There is nothing quite like looking back at something you wrote 6 years ago, particularly when the piece was about “new” technology. Your solid points seem extra solid, and your weak points seem unbearably weak. Most importantly, however, you can see the extent to which your thinking was influenced by dominant understandings and frameworks of the time. So, when I was asked to contribute a short thought-piece on social media for this inaugural issue, it occurred to me that it might be of value to look back rather than forward: to re-read something I had written about Twitter and Facebook years ago, and to identify what I got right and what I got wrong. I decided to go all the way back and to look at the very first thing I wrote about social media. This was not an academic piece, but a popular article written for Le Monde Diplomatique on the use of Twitter and Facebook in the aftermath of the 2009 Iranian elections.