Kalev's latest study explores the evolution of Twitter over the last three years, from January 2012 to December 2014 and the "global town square" model it embodies and has come to symbolize and how that town square seems to be stalled and geographically has failed to expand substantially beyond the regions it was already popular in three years ago. Yet, even while Twitter's experiment with a raw unfiltered chronologically-ordered firehose of thoughts has stalled, social media as a whole seems to be expanding rapidly, though focused on private and ephemeral communications. What does this portend for the future of social media? As the conclusion of the piece notes:
The future of Twitter is really the future of the global town square—an answer to the question of whether social media can really offer a frictionless, unfiltered forum for real-time conversation across countries and cultures, or whether those conversations will increasingly occur less visibly and more narrowly. To borrow the terminology of Stanford Law’s Jennifer Granick, the fading of the concept may represent the end of a certain kind of Internet dream.
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Australia's SBS Radio also featured the article as well.