Move over FB and Twitter: here comes a new platform for exploring ideas properly

IT sometimes feels like we’ve hit a bit of a dead end on social media when it comes to politics. As much as I love Twitter and Facebook, they are frustrating as hell at times. It’s impossible, really, to have or settle a debate on Twitter in 140 characters, and on Facebook it’s easy for discussion threads to become 10,000-word arguments about something fairly unimportant in the grand scheme. There’s a reason pictures of cats and dogs are so popular: they’re an antidote to pockets of mounting rage that have nowhere to go and no real purpose to serve.

It’s for that reason, I think, that social media is continuing to evolve in interesting ways, and it almost harks back to the pre-social networking popularity of online message boards: forums that were specifically dedicated to a common cause: a hobby or an artistic genre, for example. They were communities of people built around a shared interest, and while discussion often veered off into completely unrelated things, the communities held together because of a common bond.

I loved the old message boards back in my teens, and to this day I still keep in touch with people I met back then who live all across the world, and who I’m never likely to meet in person. Online communities built around niches seem to have more staying power. Facebook taps into that by providing an online forum for families, friends and geographical communities, whereas Twitter positions itself as a broad, open platform, the appeal of which is its accessibility to all people interested in all things. Sure, there are ways to nestle within groups of people who have similar interests, but it’s not really the whole point of it.

The appeal of the old message boards has never been replicated for me on social media, but in Scotland right now there are a couple of projects on the verge of launching which bring me back to those old days.

One of these projects is one I’m involved with: CommonSocial, which launched just this weekend. Built by Common Weal, it is fully integrated with the CommonSpace news website, which I edit, and the idea is that people who have developed a keen and active interest in politics and social issues in postindyref Scotland can finally have their own space to discuss these specific, niche issues with like-minded people.

It’s about building a community around common goals and ideas, and giving users a range of tools to network and organise with one another that broader social networks like Twitter and Facebook don’t really offer.

Another forthcoming project, created by the National Yes Registry, hopes to give Yes groups across Scotland a forum to network and organise ahead of, and during, a second independence referendum.

Nearly two years after the referendum and the explosion of community groups all over the country that accompanied it, it’s become obvious how hard it is for those groups to maintain communication when the political climate quietens.

The will is undoubtedly there, but the methods of communication are not.

When it’s left to Twitter and Facebook, the real meat of the debate becomes swept aside on forums that were never designed to cater for it. While many have lamented, and occasionally sneered at, the limits of the debate on offer, others have been working away behind the scenes developing brand new platforms to plug those gaps.

CommonSocial and the National Yes Registry are proper grass-roots projects, and it’s incredible to see what has been achieved already on shoestring budgets.

These ideas are innovative and the concepts unusual; these projects aren’t only of interest to the people who will use them, but to other tech and media professionals constantly trying to understand the nature of online communities and networks, and where it might go next.

There’s no reason Scotland can’t play a part in these wider conversations about tech and media; we shouldn’t be frightened to talk ourselves up.

Media has changed in this digital world, and the way we interact with each other is becoming fundamentally different, particularly for up-andcoming generations who’ve lived their lives alongside the internet and smartphones.

An independent Scotland needs ideas for a country fit for the future, fit for a changing world. It’s wonderfully apt for the grass roots in Scotland to rise to that challenge by creating their own new methods of digital networking and technology, by getting on with it themselves.

So if you’re getting a bit tired of Twitter and Facebook don’t lose heart, the next big things may have just arrived.