Dalton Caldwell always has interesting things to say about the social Internet, and today is no different - he notes that Twitter has appointed MySpace hack Peter Chernin to its Board of Directors and is essentially recapitulating the successful trajectory of MySpace into the social Internet powerhouse that it is today. Exciting!
They are pivoting from being a service for microblogging - discussion - to being a service for passive media consumption, because that's where the money appears to be. Facebook is, of course, famously doing the same thing.
So whence the social Internet? Do network effects inevitably trend towards passive media consumption? Is that just what humanity really is?
Related articles for this news are all over the map. BusinessInsider inexplicably thinks it's a good move. Gigaom gives a little insight into why they think so; his function is to bring street cred on the only street Twitter really needs: Madison Avenue. The only problem is that Madison Avenue doesn't understand the Internet at all - Madison Avenue is pretty sure the only thing wrong with the Internet is that it's not more like TV, and as soon as we all understand that, the better off the world will be.
But the plot really thickens when we discover that Chernin was the head of NewsCorp - and is credited with the ratings success of FOX News. FOX News - the ratings powerhouse that singlehandedly turned the news media, which Thomas Jefferson correctly identified as crucial to the working of a functional democracy to the extent that he enshrined that necessity in the Constitution itself, into entertainment. FOX News, which preserved the form of news without the messy, expensive content.
Is that really where the Internet needs to go?
Update: Ouch.
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