I’ve seen a few sessions at the conference, where I felt like there was too much of an emphasis on the specifics of the technology being used. For example, talking about how we can use Twitter (or LinkedIn, or YouTube, or TikTok) to build community.
This can’t be the point. Because tomorrow there’ll be different platforms, which will necessitate a whole new wave of research into how, when, and why the new platform works to achieve our goals. And is platform X better than platform Y.
What we need to be thinking about is how we use technology to establish, grow, and nurture relationships, and how the affordances of those technologies help us do that. Whether you’re using Twitter, Mastodon, or Threads isn’t what matters.
What matters is that you have a strategy for how you use the affordances of any platform to solve real-world problems.