It could be argued that the recent takeover of Twitter is one of the biggest strategic decisions of recent years in the digital landscape. Could the potential of Twitter to harness the power of peoples’ stories be at the heart of this decision? Professors Donald MacLean and Robert MacIntosh explore the question.
The world’s richest man has, after much toing and froing, bought one of the world’s largest digital platforms. Elon Musk renamed himself Chief Twit on taking over Twitter saying “the reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilisation to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence.”
So, might we hear some important messages from the Chief Twit?
First, it is increasingly true that the town squares and water coolers of our organisational life are digital. When lockdown forced many of us to work and interact digitally we accelerated a change which was already occurring. Even when we meet face-to-face, much of what we think is shaped by the commentary we absorb digitally. Think how you heard that the Prime Minister was changing recently. It probably wasn’t at a fixed time or at the behest of a national broadcaster and more likely that one of your social media feeds lit up, possibly even Twitter. So the town square is indeed increasingly digital.
Second, the respectful, factually accurate and tolerant sense of a safe space in which big ideas are debated is important too.
However, there may be more to it than that. The digital environment has tended to mitigate against high quality debate by serving us information that we have already expressed an affinity for and by making those servings 144 characters long. We are in danger of becoming more factionalised, less patient and less likely to hear fully formed arguments over the thunderous headline of a short soundbite. Musk claims that he is going to counter the “great danger that social media will splinter into far-right and far-left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society”.
On the face of it, this is good news. Musk has bought Twitter to help humanity by changing the digital platforms we use to communicate with each other. We can only hope so and the early move to dissolve the current board of directors will either be seen as a necessary break to deliver a more inclusive, tolerant digital town square or as a power play. Taking charge of the digital town square could be a move by the world’s richest man simply to make more money. But there might be more to it than that, he might be seeking to harness another form of power – the resurgent power of story.
In his book Narrative Economics, Nobel Prize winning economist Robert Shiller has done a great job of showing us how storytelling is more potent than ever in determining what happens in politics, economics and everyday life. Tweets become stories. Stories drive strategies. StrategyStories deliver real change. But where do stories come from? Where are they shared – and how? In the town square of course, and, increasingly, digitally. Watch that space.
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