3rd November 2022
When I was young there was an electronics shop called Tandy in the centre of Birmingham, just down from what was then (and should still be) called the Rackhams department store.
One day in 1981 I recall the shop being full of CB Radio kits and paraphernalia, for CB Radio was to be made legal with a licence and so was the Next Big Thing.
The momentous day came where people could buy a licence from the Post Office.
But.
The kits and paraphernalia were unsold, and the licences unbought.
For nobody seemed to care.
The fact that there was now this informal electronic means of instant communication did not mean anyone wanted to actually use it, and still less wanted to pay for it.
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Whenever I think of social media I often think about CB Radio, and that branch of Tandy with their piles of unsold stock.
Pleasingly, not far from where that store was, there is now a monument to Tony Hancock, whose “Radio Ham” mocked an earlier generation of instant electronic communication enthusiasts.
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One assumption is that people will carry on caring about social media in the way they did when it was new and exciting.
Of course: the idea of a social media platform cannot be un-invented, just as short wave radio could not be un-invented.
As long as there is a world wide web and access to an internet connection then there will always be a possibility of social media.
But there is no particular reason why one platform will last forever.
I recall when Friends Reunited and then MySpace were the Next Big Things.
There is no reason why Twitter and Facebook cannot go the same way, to be replaced by a new platform – or by no platform at all.
The problem for many of these sites is their commercial model.
People do not want to pay to click things.
What did for Friends Reunited for me, I recall, was then they started charging me to do things for which they had not charged before.
And the new owner of Twitter is now discovering people do not want to pay to have blue ticks.
(“The ticks are not blue but white,” say the most boring people on Twitter, just before they are muted.)
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I have never had a blue tick, and I refused the offer when it was made to me.
I set out my reasoning here.
Indeed, I am opposed to the blue tick system, as it can confer a false quality mark and it has done for some vile Twitter accounts.
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Charging for this supposed privilege seems to be backfiring.
People do not want to pay to click – or to tweet.
And just like the hapless Tandy store managers surrounded by their unsold CB Radio kits, one can imagine Elon Musk wondering why people are not paying to use instant electronic communication.
While social media is here, and free and easy to use, it will be used.
But make it less free or less easy, and then it will tend not to be used.
Perhaps Musk can convert the Twitter platform into something which will be the Next Big Thing.
Perhaps Musk is the new king of the road:
“Cos when you’re up in the cab, you’re the king of the road
And it’s dead romantic, like.
And then I remembered my two-way radio,
So I started feelin’ better,
And I thought “I’ll start a convoy
You know, just like that American feller.””
“Er, Plastic Chicken, don’t you think you’d better change gear for this hill?
What’s wrong with the gear I’ve got on, doesn’t it look right?
Change gear, ram your foot on the floor and change the gear, what you talking about, you don’t know how to drive a truck do you, you’ve no idea how to drive a truck, you’re mad..”
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We will see if Musk has any idea how to drive this particular truck.
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In similar vein: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnunhozizjM
MES in vintage scathing form
In this world of darkness we will always have The Fall :)
I am reminded of an interview given by Kenny Everett as pirate radio sank beneath the waves, courtesy of a certain Tony Benn.
Everett said the fans of illegal naughty things would protest the end of poor quality, seaborne radio transmissions and bemoan a strong land based signal, provided by the new, fuddy duddy BBC Radio One.
He would not be joining them in their wailing and neither would most of the crews of the pirate ships.
For with illegal naughtiness had come mal de mer; unsafe vessels with dubious provenance; questionable employment practises; bad food and conditions; and even murder on at least two recorded occasions.
Everett, for reasons passing the understanding of his hardcore fans, was happy to pass up all that to provide a better quality of programme for the mass of his listeners and a less eventful, more enriching work and home life for himself.
Having said that, I scandalised my Nan by tuning into Radio Caroline when it was relaunched on the waves, air and sea, in the 1980s.
One just could not pass up the chance of breaking the law …
your comment about Pirate Radio reminded me of this blog by Adam Curtis
https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2011/09/the_curse_of_tina.html
“In 1965 the IEA published a booklet that made this clear. It’s aim was to “lay out the philosophical and political theory behind Pirate Radio”. It concluded with a section called “Piracy as a Business Force”. The new heroes it said were the “privateers” who were going to open up the system of information flow – so the market could work efficiently.”
“Smedley’s opponent was the Postmaster General – Tony Benn. Here is Benn in 1964 fulminating about Pirate radio because it was breaking the rules of copyright. This is the same argument that would reappear with the cyber-utopians of the 1990s.”
Rather more eye-opening to me is the explicit recognition when the IEA was established in 1955 that “if we said openly that we were re-teaching the economics of the free-market, it might enable our enemies to question the charitableness of our motives”.
It might, indeed.
Great thoughts and also I now have Tandy and leafing through the catalogue looking at things I’ll never buy back in my imagination. Times change. But Musk hasn’t cottoned on yet.
it’s a bold move for sure ;) given that the celeb accounts are a major draw, you’d think he wouldn’t want to drive them away, seems predatory types have a habit of imitating celebs too.
a friend of mine worked in tandy years ago, he said the really expensive stuff flew out of the door with ease while they were often stuck with the tat for ages, as I recall it was mostly tat near the end.
someone in the states described radio shack (from whence it came) as being like this combo head shop and something else, this guy would show you the light organ that pulsed in time with your music, then it supposedly turned into more of a pushy cell phone retailer in later years.
It seems to be a fallacy of those in power to assume people will react to things in the manner ‘they’ expect like the town council which discourages cars from their town so that ‘people will walk, cycle or use public transport for better enjoyment of the town facilities’ only to find themselves with a deserted town centre as people drive elsewhere to somewhere with free parking.
Interesting. Where is this ‘deserted town centre’ created by discouraging cars?
It’s important to say that the reason Twitter started verifying users was because there were a number of high-profile incidents of fakery. It was easy enough to set up an account and pretend to be someone else, both for financial scams and to send inappropriate messages.
Journalists, for instance, have seen numerous attempts to create fake accounts in order to do all sorts of things. As a technology journalist, I’ve had friends and colleagues impersonated in order to a) Promote Cryptocurrencies, b) Try to message major brands asking for free product and c) Send rude or harassing messages to people, all under their names, and with their profile image.
I do agree with you that the system is flawed, and that it can convey an unearned sense of authority or prestige. Especially when that is then used to spread hateful, false or otherwise harmful material with the tacit approval of the platform in question. But I would say that it’s an imperfect solution to an imperfect problem, but one designed to at least in part address the original mischief. Much like VAR, people can grouse about the system as it stands, but the injustices that led to its introduction were far worse.
I disagree, for the reasons set out in the post to which I link.
Well now, this is awkward. I agree with both you and Dan (and I have read your reasoning, David.)
I didn’t finish my last and I meant to add this.
Perhaps the best answer is better moderation, so that when an account pops up to make mischief or cause real distress, it is dealt with quickly.
But now, it would appear that I’ll be able to buy a blue (white) tick under the name of David Allen Green if I want, Dan – so the very point of the symbol dies at the point is becomes a commercial transaction.
I became ‘verified’ for this reason.
There is published research on whether or not the “blue check” does anything for the person who gets one:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30848675/
Short version: nope.
I have always assumed that the main advantage accrues to Twitter; people are drawn to the platform by the knowledge that they can read tweets which are credibly attributed to authorities/celebrities.
(Which is why asking authorities/celebrities to pay Twitter for accreditation is ludicrous; it would make more sense for Twitter to pay them.)
There is published research but it doesn’t accord with my experience, which was big reach growth and real world earnings.
It’s possible that a major cause of the failure of legal UK “Citizen’s Band” radio communications was due to the way it was done. CB had been around in the US for many years and the equipment was very cheap and easily obtained in the US. Despite being illegal in the UK, it was relatively easy and inexpensive to grey-import sets from the States, and as a result there grew an extensive, technically illegal, CB community in Britain, using US-sourced rigs.
When, thanks to extensive campaigns for legalisation, it was ultimately officially realised that CB was a popular thing that people wanted to do, it was finally decided to legalise CB – but for various reasons (primarily to discourage grey imports, one imagines) to require special UK-specific rigs that used FM instead of the AM system used in the States. These would be incompatible with the US-style rigs and thus users of one system could neither hear nor talk to those on the other.
This meant that UK CB enthusiasts – many, if not most, of whom already had illegal US rigs and used them extensively – would be obliged to both leave their existing on-air AM communities AND buy new gear that was (of course) significantly more expensive than their existing equipment. By and large, unsurprisingly, they declined to do so. As a result the market for the new legal FM rigs was limited primarily to those who had not invested in US rigs because they didn’t want to break the law.
Had the authorities simply legalised Citizen’s Band in a manner compatible with the American model, which is specifically what campaigners at the time were calling for, it would probably have done quite well: the illegal British AM CB communities stuck around for some considerable time after the availability of UK-approved gear.
Thank you Richard for this fascinating and informative reply.
The commoditisation and ubiquitisation of ‘social media’ is going to be fascinating to watch.
WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, released in 1989, cost $495. The same functionality is now widely available on the internet, completely free of charge.
More Twitter-functionality apps – perhaps interoperable with each other, so that concerns need not be overriding about ‘critical mass’ for any individual platform – are plausible.
I dont know whether this is really an analogy or not but Rackhams was where my mom used to take us to gaze at the beautifully done Christmas window displays before taking us to Lewis’s to get a picture with Father Christmas, Lewis’s of course was cheaper.
Never did find out what was at “the back o Rackhams” either.
I have neither the fame the following or/nor the notoriety to warrant a blue tick but then neither do I have the yearning for one, I do enjoy twitter and it serves a useful purpose, but I will never pay for any social media platform, especially one which has such lopsided standards that the Ayatollah can have his blue tick whilst the sitting President of the USA is thrown off the site and one which can and has censored my speech contrary to the laws of this fair isle.
10-4.
Ps. My rig was a Lafayette 1200FM, I think that fad lasted about 18 months.
“that the Ayatollah can have his blue tick whilst the sitting President of the USA is thrown off the site”
And it comes to something, does it not, when an Ayatollah is widely considered (by the rest of the world) to be less obnoxious and more trustworthy than a sitting US president?
The Lewis’s Grotto on the fifth floor (?) with its animated scenes, for which one queued patiently all the way up a fire escape from a ground entrance was the premier grotto, followed by that in Rackham’s which never quite managed to equal it.
For those looking for something different, where the designers had aspired, but often sadly fallen short, there was the grotto in the Co Op Department Store on the High Street.
One thing I remember about Rackham’s was the electric shock you might get from the metal edge of the display cabinets (the static build-up from the carpets, presumably). And the rocking horse in the toy department.
Sitting US President was never banned. Not until he was no longer President. That was their policy on world leaders. I don’t think your comparison says much of anything.
Trump’s twitter account was suspended just after the Capitol Hill events which was a couple of weeks before his term ended.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/twitter-permanently-bans-president-donald-trump-n1253588
I would call that a squatting US President. I suppose Twitter finally drew the line at inciting armed insurrection. Two weeks before his term, though. That’s pretty close to the end. Unless he managed to stage a coup and stay on. It was a close thing. Worst two months of my life, end of November to end of January. Couldn’t be certain the union would survive. I’m still not sure it has.
Tandy was the parent company of Radio Shack in the US. The company had a not very good reputation etc.
CBs had their 15 minutes of fame in the mid-’70s. They had originally been used by truck (lorry) drivers to warn colleagues of traffic, police etc. It went big. Betty Ford was First Momma. The Fords left Washington in Jan. 1977. By the time CBs were approved in the UK, the moment had passed. It took too long to get there. Why? I don’t know. But once a moment has passed, it is dead. (Movie of Cats anyone)
Elon Musk, a South African Canadian American – the richest man in the world.
• PayPal
• Tesla
• Space-X
• Twitter
There is no guarantee that everything Elon touches will eventually turn to gold! Perhaps this time he is out of his depth. Certainly him trying to intercede in Putin’s War has rather backfired and earned him much flack from Ukraine.
This time he knows he’s made a mistake. The effort he went to to get out of buying it shows that.
Here’s the thing that Musk, an obviously very bright guy, appears to misunderstand about the company he has recently bought.
Facebook became enormously successful unlike its predecessors because Zuck made the intuitive leap that the users of the platform are not customers, but the product itself. That product is sold in various ways.
Making users pay will cause them to leave, thus diluting and damaging the product. That he doesn’t seem to get this very basic concept is baffling.
He thinks he bought a technology company. He didn’t. It had a novel approach and has some novel features, but the technology driving Twitter is far from its greatest asset. Musk will hopefully learn this one day to his immense cost.
Not quite right.
The product is access to the users, not the users themselves.
And I thought I was pedant! Sorry, I really didn’t think that distinction was necessary. Not since the abolition of slavery.
I have managed to eke out an existence without a Facebook or Twitter or Instagram account. I comment on the FT (which is moderated by a puritanical American algorithm which fortunately does not have a large English vocabulary) and on here. I do not feel in the least unfulfilled, rather that much of my private life remains private.
Amusing story about Rackhams: my mother sent my clergyman father from the vicarage at Beoley (just outside Redditch) to Rackhams in Brum to purchase some new pyjamas. He found none to his taste and wandered onto another floor and into the music department where instead of pyjamas he bought a Steinway piano. Needless to say he did not actually bring it home with him.
Excellent post.
It seems quite possible that the trickling exodus of blue tick accounts that has been reported may develop into a more general wave of departures.
One thing that may have contributed to Twitter’s success was the way that Jack Dorsey ran it – it seemed quite polite and restrained and allowed users to have a sense of protected ownership of their personal tweetspace.
That sense is notably absent now that Musk is at the helm. His approach generates a feeling of intrusion and trespass into the personal space; one cannot help feeling that he intends to attempt to direct and dominate one’s use of the platform, which will deprive it of its sophistry of having a social and conversational nature and convert it to a much more overt ideological battleground, on which far fewer of us will want to engage.
All I really remember about Tandy were those little packets of three screwdrivers, made out of a metal softener than most screws.
Sorry to be picky, but charging users is not what did for Friends Reunited. It began as a subscription service charging £7.50 a year. At its height, it had 15m users, at which point its founders sold it to ITV for £120m. ITV then scrapped the subscription fee.
My recollection was that one day I was asked to pay to do something on FriendsReunited for which I had never been asked to pay before, and that was it for me. I stopped using it.
The main reason that the legal CB radios didn’t sell wasn’t because there was no demand, it was because the demand was already met by the illegal equipment, and the new, legal gear wasn’t compatible with what we already had. So there was no point any of us switching to the legal gear unless all of us did it at once. Which obviously wasn’t going to happen. So we stuck with the illegal gear, at least until we finally got bored with pretending to be American truckers.
Having said that, apparently the legal CB radios did sell well initially, mainly to people who liked the idea but had been put off by the need to break the law in order to indulge in it. But, of course, they formed a completely separate community to us, and soon found that they were only talking to themselves. And then discovered that CB radio is a classic example of the Tragedy of the Commons – it only works if all the users co-operate properly. Otherwise, it’s too easy for anti-social users to spoil it for everybody else, for example by holding conversations on the calling channels or just plain vandalism by broadcasting a blank signal (or music).
Anti-social behaviour was not, generally, a problem in the illegal CB community, partly because there was a certain amount of honour among airwave thieves but also because, if somebody really annoyed us, we had the nuclear option of dobbing them in. Which did happen, occasionally. But there we no such constraints on the legal users; provided they had a licence and legal kit then the authorities had no interest at all in what they did on air. So it all started to go wrong very quickly. People stoped using them, and stopped buying them, and the shops were left with stacks of unsold equipment.
As for social media, I used to have an account on Friends Reunited, I’ve still got an account on MySpace but never use it, and Google pulled my Google+ account from under me. I’m on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok (which I really don’t understand, I suspect it’s my age), but I’ll happily move on from any of those when a better alternative comes along. And I’m not verified either, on any platform.
The next big thing?
Zuckerberg has bet $Billions on his Metaverse.
We’ll see.
Ubik by Philip K. Dick has a scene where the front door refuses to open until it is paid outstanding fees.
David, as always a well-reasoned blog today, as was the previous one you’ve linked to in your post above.
You are of course correct to be wary of appeals to authority. They are not on their own sufficient. I have always found Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit an indispensable guide to critical reasoning.
And I think he would agree with you, up to a point. Tool 3 of 9 points states:
“Arguments from authority carry little weight – ‘authorities’ have made mistakes in the past. They will do so in the future”.
But.
He went on to say:
“Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts”.
Experts. Remember them?
Feel free to delete ‘in science’ and insert ‘on/in Twitter/the media/academia/medicine, the law, etc, etc, etc’.
As a non-lawyer, where does one start on Twitter to look for insights on legal matters, if not to experienced lawyers, political scientists, historians and some journalists? For me that is the starting point. But not the end point.
Without wishing to blow smoke (well maybe just a little), I suspect your readers come to you because you have a solid track record as a seasoned, successful professional lawyer (the starting point) and then, critically, as someone who writes so clearly, expertly and with a wonderful sense of humour.
Well.
And I think you understate the value of the blue tick to some Twitter readers.
Admission: I don’t have one. I only have one follower and that’s from a famous historian, which is bizarre and must have been by accident as I choose not to Tweet. In case you are wondering why, it’s for the same reason that I don’t write for the Times/Telegraph/Guardian, The Economist, etc.
Verification is important. To justify this point, I refer to another great authority Martin Lewis’ (MSE) 31 Oct Tweet:
“Having campaigned against PAID-FOR scam ads for years, I’m concerned at rumours Twitter will turn the verified #blueTick into paid-for option. Scammers, shysters, criminals are likely to be happy to pay for, and manipulate this, for a veneer of legitimacy”.
So.
Thanks for all your blogs. They make me think and occasionally make my brain hurt. In a good way.
“I suspect your readers come to you because you have a solid track record as a seasoned, successful professional lawyer (the starting point) and then, critically, as someone who writes so clearly, expertly and with a wonderful sense of humour. ”
I did!
If people abandon the blue tick, it seems possible to me that Twitter may improve in terms of tone. Media Twitter – and in particular US media Twitter – raises the heat on every topic as those people clamour to signal their good standing within the media bubble. This is a reason why I’m also doubtful that the blue tick will fade.
Charging for the tick is only the thin end of the wedge. He’s about to embark on a series of misguided changes that will surely destroy that platform. It’s already something of a toxic cesspit. Soon there will only be the element left.
I think the only worthwhile use of a blue tick is to identify the Joe Bloggs who is a public figure out of all the other Joe Bloggs on Twitter. No one else needs one except for vanity reasons. It is all too easy to make your own blue tick if you really want one.
Musk appears to have bought Twitter for all the wrong reasons and is now finding out how difficult it is to make more money out of it. Allowing back poisonous permanently banned accounts certainly won’t help its appeal. Twitter needs moderation and that means moderation must have teeth, including permanently banning accounts if necessary.
I mainly use twitter for entertainment and to read interesting commentators. I don’t regard it as a reliable source of news and I never follow things its algorithms recommend. I certainly won’t be using it to buy stuff.
Totally agree that people expect their social media to be free. But I wonder if Musk is just playing around. He seems to be acting like a kid in a candy store who’s been told “Take whatever you want!”. (In this case he’s also been told – “Kiddo – you now own the candy store!”) Maybe he’s just trying to stir up lots of reaction while not really caring whether blue ticks stay or go. After all, it make little financial sense.
When you see that he’s a “longtermist”, it could be that his only major priority is to ensure that humanity gets interstellar. Future lives are more important than present lives.
It’s like a scifi novel, and we’re right in the middle of it.
This is a chilling read:
https://davetroy.medium.com/no-elon-and-jack-are-not-competitors-theyre-collaborating-3e88cde5267d
I don’t feel the need to sign up with Twitter, for money or not.
One observation, for most news/commentary sites I can read the headline then skip to the comments and not waste time on the ‘flesh’. With the better authors it is sometimes worth going back for a deeper look, but for most – not.
But with this blog OGH is worth reading from top to toe and then taking in the comments. A quick scan is not enough, it’s meaty all the way through – thankyou.
As for Mr Musk, brilliant chap but there is something about his business model I feel uncomfortable with. I feel it will all come tumbling down one day. Probably wrong, we shall see.
As with state honours I (like to think that I) would not have accepted a blue tick if offered. Also as with state honours, it would however have been nice to have been offered one.