The ongoing collapse of Twitter as a meaningful forum – and if we’re lucky, the imminent irrelevance of several other major social media giants – offers a unique opportunity to journalists, in particular to younger writers and students without established brand personas.
Seize the day.
Delete your old posts.
Change your name, or rather, adjust your existing name. It doesn’t need to be a complete change. Style yourself with an initial. Change a name to less or more formal. Joseph Bloggs becomes Joe Bloggs, or JT Bloggs, or J Thomas Bloggs, or Seosamh Ó Blogaire. How far you want to go depends on how big a change you’re planning. Maybe just enough to evade the search engines, or maybe you’ve got a whole new career path in mind. The sky’ the limit.
And of course, it doesn’t have to be just the kids who are scrubbing those awkward adolescent posts. Anyone can reinvent themselves. So go ahead, create a new online persona. Delete that old Twitter account. Make X the ex-site.
And why stop there? Kill the old LinkedIn profile. Get yourself a new email address.
Leave behind the past, and think for a while about what the future might look like.
