In my opinion, remembering what it was like before social media and high-speed internet access is a gift. The early days of social media barely resemble the landscape of how impressionable and profit-driven it is today. Data privacy wasn't considered "a thing," and promoting a product or service back then was influential thanks to television, radio, and print media. However, when social media titans Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp went down, many came flooding back to Twitter to stay connected. Thanks to this 6-hour social media outage, 'architecture Twitter' was there to express what many of us were thinking.
Social media is defined as "forms of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos)." Today, this term has become synonymous with platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, and Twitter to name a few.
These platforms are tools, but there's no denying it has become a double-edged sword for the architecture industry. After reflecting on the outage, I'm reminded that social media for architecture isn't only about sharing highly curated images. It's also about commenting on the real world, sharing information, and discussing how architecture can be admired, questioned, and critiqued.
On that day, I turned to the social media outlet that wasn't impacted by the outage, Twitter. To get a pulse as to how the community was feeling I scrolled through my Twitter feed to find a selection of hot takes on the matter. Below are some of my favorite tweets.
Since 1997, Archinect has been the first and largest online community of architects, students, and architecture fans. Despite the outage, our community of Archinectors still stayed informed thanks to our editorial, newsletters, and forums.
In case of another social media outage, stay up to date with all things architecture employment, professional practice, and academic-related by following @archinect and @architectjobs on Twitter.
2 Comments
I was honestly just thinking about this last weekend. The Archinect Forum was one of the very earliest forms of social media, way before even, for example, Am I Hot or Not or plastic.com. I remember when we discussed on Thread Central - like, page 400 or so?! - how this new Facebook thing seemed to be garnering a lot of attention.
Then we did the Archinect Sessions podcast, at a time when the only other architecture podcast I knew of was ArchiSpeak. Now architecture podcasts are everywhere, too many to keep up!
Whatever Archinect is just starting to do now will be worth paying attention to, as it’s been a leader from the beginning.
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