Weekly New/Digital Media homework Week 25

WEEK 25

1. As Twitter turns 10, here are 10 predictions for its next decade

• From Stephen Fry and Deep Drumpf to Kanye West and badly drawn penises, here’s the future of the social network as it enters double figures
• Just setting up my twttr”: Jack Dorsey posted the first ever tweet on 21 March 2006, when Twitter was still a vowel-less side project of podcasting firm Odeo. The decade since then has been a riot of hashtags, feuds, breaking news, white and gold black and blue dresses, spoilers, one-liners, furiousmen’s rights activists, political movements, tweetstorms and celebrity bottoms.
• What might the next decade hold in store? Here are some confident predictions for the next 10 years of Everyone’s Favourite Social App That Isn’t Facebook, or WhatsApp, or Facebook Messenger, or Instagram or Snapchat.
  1) When the 140-character limit disappears, Kanye West will be 94% of the average user’s timeline.
  2) Stephen Fry will leave and rejoin Twitter once a year, on average.
  3) The Deep Drumpf neural-network Twitter bot will strike another blow for AI against humankind by defeating Hillary Clinton in a televised debate.
  4) Twitter will follow Facebook in adding new ‘reaction’ buttons as alternatives to liking or retweeting. ‘THIS’ and ‘Check your privilege’ will be the first to be added.
  5) After outrage over non-chronological timelines, Twitter will switch everyone’s timelines to chronological, starting in 2006, to see how much they like it.
  6) The number of times The Death Of Twitter is predicted by experts will narrowly outnumber the number of times hoax deaths of celebrities are retweeted.
  7) In an effort to compete with Snapchat, Twitter will launch a feature for scribbling doodles and sending them to other users. Every prominent woman on Twitter’s inbox will fill up with badly drawn penises.
  8) Concerned about people staying off Twitter to avoid TV spoilers, the company will hire an army of interns to creep into people’s houses at night and whisper upcoming Game of Thrones plotlines into their ears while they sleep.
  9) Still, 10 years in the future, no one will ever have clicked on a promoted tweet on purpose.

2. Pop, rock, rap, whatever: who killed the music genre?

• Skrillex produces Bieber, Rihanna covers Tame Impala, and the genre-bending 1975 top the charts. The people making and consuming music are more stylistically promiscuous than ever. How did we get here?
• Pitchfork, widely viewed as the world’s leading alternative music website, relaunched this week. Along with a rather pleasant new look, it announced “a significant new feature”, the ability to view the site according to genre.
• The 1975 have just scored a transatlantic No 1 with an album whose influences range from Yazoo to David Bowie. If you look at everynoise.com and key in, say, Lana Del Rey, you’ll find her listed under “pop, indie R&B, indietronica, chamber pop, synthpop”; she’s all of those, a bit, but at the same time not completely any of those. All are representative of a strain of artists who are post-genre. They now straddle, or exist beyond, genres that seemed set in concrete as little as 10 years ago. They represent a cross-pollination that makes it harder than ever to definitively state that you like or dislike one genre or another.