We’re being trained to dip our toes into a rapidly flowing river and not focus on deeper ideas and thoughts or reflect on longer pieces further back in our history.
On the other hand, reading more and more from my variety of feed readers, I realize that on the broader web, I’m seeing people linking to and I’m also reading much older blog posts. In the last few days alone I’ve seen serious longform material from 2001, 2005, 2006, 2011, and 2018 just a few minutes ago.
The only time I see long tail content on Twitter is when someone has it pinned to the top of their page.
Taking this a level deeper, social is thereby forcing us to not only think shallowly, but to make our shared histories completely valueless. This is allowing some to cry fake news and rewrite history and make it easier for their proponents to consume it and believe it all. Who cares about the scandals and problems of yesterday when tomorrow will assuredly be better? And then we read the next Twitter-based treat and start the cycle all over again.
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Noting that most linking behavior on social media contextually is both shallow and ahistorical, Chris Aldrich suggests that something else altogether happens in the blogosphere, even today.
What I find interesting is the degree to which bloggers self-reference for context, which is right in line with the idea that formally speaking blogging is a sort of thinking-out-loud, process-over-product.
I’ve talked before about how the fundamental unit of the web is the hyperlink, and the degree to which much social media artificially limits the full power of that unit by restricting its usage, whether by Twitter’s lack of proper inline links (with even preview-embeds limited to just a single link from a tweet) or by Instagram’s “link in bio” problem.
In the milieu, then, of social media’s designed focus on being a “rapidly flowing river”, the contextual web built by true hyperlinking gets washed away.
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@c FYI, @adders wrote a great piece about recency killing the web last year (with some useful conversation here), and it’s a great companion to yours 👍
Notwithstanding the comparison, I think there’s a glaring difference between recency and temporality on the web. Recency doesn’t rule out context, whereas temporality certainly seems to. Temporality feeds into the death of the link, in the sense that a transient form like social media simply doesn’t provide much time for at most a single link. Recency doesn’t itself preclude the construction of a contextual web in the way that temporality does, so I’m not convinced that the blog broke the web. The problem with static homepages is that people are not static. They are fine as snapshots but mostly useless as ongoing thought. People lives their lives as processes, not as end-products, and even if someone were adding things to their homepage over time, the easiest way for an interested party to learn about it would be if the homepage were publishing additions to a feed—in which case the interested party would still be experiencing that person through a recency experience. People thinking out loud through chronological blog posts isn’t the problem; the problem is that poor-text, single-link social media formats disallow the contextual web.
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@smokey For some reason I had to blog about this at 11:20pm last night. bix.blog/2019/12/1…
How do you converse with a wiki?
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How do you converse with a wiki?
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How do you converse with a wiki?
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@bix You were more cogent at 11:20pm than I was! (That makes me think that the “What’s New” page on my website proper perhaps should offer a feed—or maybe that’s a job for
h-feed.)I don’t really like likes. On the big silos of the social industry they have become weaponised; a kind of social Taylorism, where the craft of building social relationships has been reduced to unskilled labour – just another way of automating us.
Even on the open web, where they are not designed to distract, likes are still a bit of a weak form of interaction. I think they have their place, but I want something a bit more. Something more than comments below a post, too. They’re a bit constrained – in hock to the main body of text above.
Blogchains
I came across the idea of blogchains the other day, on Tom Critchlow’s blog I believe. The word is from Venkatesh Rao, and the very tl;dr is that it’s a string of short, ad-hoc blog posts that build on a theme. That’s cool, and tied in with a wiki is kind of how I see me builing up ideas over time.
But where the idea gets really interesting (for me) is when it extends to cross-site blogchains and open blogchains. These are more open-ended, involving two or more people conversing and building on a theme, simply by posting to their blog about it and linking the posts together. Kind of like a webring, but for posts rather than sites.
There’s definitely something to be said for the long-form, turn-based conversation. One of the best conversations I have had recently was a long email chain. And some of the thoughts that have stuck with me the most are ones I’ve written as a long reply to someone else’s open question or musings on a topic.
Hyperconversations
The blogchain thing reminded me of something Kicks wrote about a few months back – hyperconversations. It’s a chat between friends, conducted across blogs and wikis. Less formal than a blogchain – no predetermined theme.
Conversations that last
I think what they’re both getting at, is using social software to have distributed conversations that last more than just an hour or two.
Chris wrote about the temporality of social media.
Shallow conversations disappear off the timeline and out of our minds pretty quickly. As mentioned, I don’t think this is true just for Twitter and Facebook though. It’s more a problem of the medium.
Not to rag on likes and reposts too much. I do them plenty. There’s a time and place for everything. And I’m not saying that I want to have to sit down and write a 500 word blog post every time I want to say hi to a friend. But! I would definitely like some more conversations that last.
So who’s up for a blogchain, or a hyperconversation?