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.
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.
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. Author: Bix The unsupported use case of a mediocre, autistic midlife in St. Johns, Oregon —now with added global pandemic. &lt;a href="https://bix.blog/author/bix"&gt; View all posts by Bix &lt;/a&gt;