UMSI's Cliff Lampe on Twitter's evolution and 'The Outcry Over Elon'

In this episode of Michigan Minds, Cliff Lampe, professor of information at the U-M School of Information, joins U-M director of social media and public engagement Nikki Sunstrum to discuss Elon Musk’s recent purchase of Twitter, post-pandemic social media usage and behavior, and the importance of digital literacy and education.

Lampe provides insight on what Musk’s acquisition means for Twitter users and how much of the platform’s infrastructure Musk can actually change. He compares and contrasts what will be easy for Musk to change, like policies — including who gets banned for what — and what will be more difficult, like an edit button. He explains that integrating a feature like an edit button is much more complex than it seems, as Twitter’s platform was built in 2006 and has a complicated infrastructure.

“I’m sure it’s technically possible to change the back end to allow that, but you’re talking about a scope and the scale that most people can imagine —Twitter’s a huge site with a complicated infrastructure. It’s not just going to be a snap of the fingers to make major interface changes like that. Even if they did, you’d have to test it, make sure it works well, ensure there’s no unintended consequences — it’s actually a lot more complicated than people think it is to change a big platform like that."

He discusses another challenge that will mitigate making great changes on Twitter, which is the market forces. Lampe comments on the fact that the platform is still highly used for advertising, and companies have pressure on them regarding the content that their advertisement is next to.

In regards to how social media is changing through generations of users, Lampe expands on how today’s youth is using social media differently than other generations. He provides insight on the social media behavior of university students and explains their engagement on apps like Instagram, TikTok and Reddit. Lampe provides insight on how Twitter is not the main platform this age demographic seem to be using, and how many don’t use Facebook at all.

“I think what a lot of the young people do is called context collapse, where you want different parts of your life to be separate from one another. For example, ‘I don’t want my work friends to know my real friends’ kind of thing. And so they’re subdividing those separate networks in their lives by having them on different platforms. I might be working on Linkedin and Twitter, but my social or entertainment life is on Instagram and TikTok.”

Lampe also talks about one of his current projects, which is an information literacy campaign on TikTok. He explains the conversion of lessons from UMSI’s Introduction to Information undergraduate course to TikTok videos, providing students the chance to engage with their course material using social media.

“Hopefully it’ll be a fun, short, interesting way to engage with content in a different way.”

Listen to the full episode online.

Listen to the full episode on Spotify. 

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Learn more about professor Cliff Lampe, expert on social media, online communities and computer-mediated communication. 

Read The Outcry Over Elon on the University of Michigan Public Engagement & Impact website.