How long do you think Twitter will be around?
In my opinion Twitter is dead. The question should be how log do you think before we bury Twitter.com. The flock of migrating net birds is moving on to bigger and better data trees. The twitter nest will soon have only lame birds in the tree of senseless data groves. The smart tweeters will be gone.

To migrate is natural and it is by instinct.

The remaining Twitters are going to kick the bucket. It will be just a matter of time.

Although its supposition guess what might happen if we removed the machine? Would we return to serfs and slavery or would the “social revolution” suppress the need for cheap labour?

The point is we are looking for factors that change society overall. The usual elements are culture, economics, geography, politics, technology. They are generally all lumped to together as equal factors. But they really have different characteristics.

Culture, economics and politics are based on intimate human feelings. They are all based on our intimate needs and desires. Their sphere is our hopes and desires. Now depending on your view of the human spirit these things do not change in hundreds, maybe thousands of years.

Technology is far more like geography in that it is external and forms part of the environment. It has the possibility to change far more rapidly than the strictly social based elements.

I’m not utopian about this and think geography often trumps technology. I don’t think you can predict what will happen but it does seem to instigate change.

Look at the panic over obesity at the moment. Individually people are eating too much, because they have access to cheap food. The cheap food is a result of technology. The economic desire for cheap food is pretty much eternal and global. But the newest factor is the mix is technology.

Someone of the left could argue that the fattening food is the result of capitalist manufacture. But then level of social repression needed to stop access to cheap high energy food is severe. Imagine prohibition on sugar.

I would also argue that technology is feeding the growth in market globalization. It decreases the barriers between unbalanced markets. It is in a feedback loop.

I can see how technological determinism has become distrusted by the Left. But it is worth remembering that Marx was a determinist who said “The windmill gives you society with the feudal lord: the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist”

I agree everything is never equal. But some things maybe constant such as the human spirit.

In terms of his work on power in D&P, my understanding is that Mr F was interested in the ways that power operates through different forms (what he called a regime) at different periods of time in history, and this leads me to think about social media as a disciplining regime. Mr F also argued that regimes are not always oppressive, which is why on 1st inspection , given what is being claimed about digital marketing , participation and brands online, power being put into the hands of the consumer etc. he seems so relevant. But I think Mr F’s work offers more, because he looked at the idea of institutional procedures. If we think of digital marketing as the institution, brand strategy as a complex set of practices, and analysize the workings of the power relations between consumer and producer – I believe there is, what he’d call, ‘a regime of truth’ that consumers have more agency than they really do once you get into the economics of value.

Ps Roger why don’t you like Foucault? He is the biz!

Very pretty and fun, though, as you say.