Daniel Benneworth-Grey on Twitter and Artistic Assessment
In 2011, our design correspondent Daniel Benneworth-Gray was a guest editor on CR's Twitter feed. Here he reflects on how the social media channel has changed in recent years
This square magazine conducted an experiment on social media foolishness nine years ago. A handful of guest editors were given the keys to @CreativeReview on Twitter, each tweeting whatever they wanted for a day. Together with Tom Actman, Nick Asbury and Anna Gerber and Britt Iversen from Visual Editions, I was one of the “chosen ones”. Together we tried to bring our own voices into Creative Review without doing too much damage.
Twitter was still relatively new – it had only been there for five years and the CR account only existed for two of them. Magazines examined the purpose of the platform when rhythms and conventions came into force. This guest editorial was an exercise to connect the personal with the company and find out how editorial voices can work in this faster new space.
It seemed a terribly big responsibility to me to project every personality I could have onto this prestigious magazine with all of its employees, advertisers and legacy. Sharing my valuable bookmarks with several hundred thousand followers was not a training course in identifying, recognizing and ultimately guessing a target group – and trying not to lose them.