>[Twitter] amplifies meaningless shit into the stratosphere with its trending algorithms
Doubtful, given how popular it is among people and ogranisations that carefully measure the RoI of their marketing & outreach operations, and constantly adjust balance of their efforts among 2, 3, 4 different communication channels (YT, Insta, mail, in-person events, topical forums, old style media, etc.).
A more fitting hypothesis would be, "Twitter opened up a couple new paradigms of influencing people". The paradigms are complex, opaque, and subtly inter-related; quite hard to grasp for people that aren't fully "in the loop". That's why there appearance of chaos and, at the same time, we see highly organized action emerges from this chaos.
> >[Twitter] amplifies meaningless shit into the stratosphere with its trending algorithms
> Doubtful, given how popular it is among people and ogranisations that carefully measure the RoI of their marketing & outreach operations, and constantly adjust balance of their efforts among 2, 3, 4 different communication channels (YT, Insta, mail, in-person events, topical forums, old style media, etc.).
I'm not sure why you think that the two are incompatible, or opposed.
I don't mean to suggest that marketing is entirely meaningless, but surely the ROI of any particular marketing effort is largely independent of its meaningfulness?
That's fair - I wasn't trying to make the point that it can't be weaponized. In fact it's quite the opposite.
I guess my main point with that quote is that it amplifies things (sometimes organically viral, sometimes engineered) and then places them all on the same level. So the userbase starts to believe that something that trended on twitter is just as globally important/well known as the genuine world news story that trended beside it, because it's all in one pot.
Doubtful, given how popular it is among people and ogranisations that carefully measure the RoI of their marketing & outreach operations, and constantly adjust balance of their efforts among 2, 3, 4 different communication channels (YT, Insta, mail, in-person events, topical forums, old style media, etc.).
A more fitting hypothesis would be, "Twitter opened up a couple new paradigms of influencing people". The paradigms are complex, opaque, and subtly inter-related; quite hard to grasp for people that aren't fully "in the loop". That's why there appearance of chaos and, at the same time, we see highly organized action emerges from this chaos.