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

In the beginning was the Word.

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Well, in the beginning there were words.

Lots of words, all over the place, at the beginning of the internet and then of the World Wide Web.

And this was because words were easy: text was one of the easiest of things to transmit.

Early social media was thereby text-dominated.

Yes, there were rudimentary ways of hosting and sending pictures and video and sound files.

But with text you could create more text - while pictures and videos and sound files were difficult to create and edit.

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.

Even on Facebook you only had a limited text field into which you could type: “So-and-so is [ ]”.

Pretty soon, however, there were WYSIWYG social media and blogging.

Anybody, if the wanted, could compose, create and even edit words on the screen.

And so text-based social media took off, especially on Twitter.

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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:

As she elaborates:

“…journalists are people who write for a living. Twitter is and was a place where thoughts are expressed in writing.”

And what she says about journalists can also be said about lawyers: the stuff of lawyering, like the stuff of journalism, is words.

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As the eminent jurist Eliza Doolittle once averred:

“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?”

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It was all that us blighters - journalists, lawyers, and so on - could do, and it suited us.

Social media seemed a perfect medium.

But.

Text-based social media was only the start - an early stage just because text was easy, and other forms were less easy.

And now the other forms are catching up, and indeed they have caught up.

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.

There will still be a place for text-based social media, just like there are those who persist with CB Radio.

But it was just a phase we were going through.