Thursday February 24, 2022; 6:53 PM EST
- The following thread of tweets, composed yesterday and revised today, seems to me to show a social system that functions fairly well up until the point where the posts digesting new ideas start to move down the screen into the archive. At this point, a new set of skills and a new level of social organization would be needed to bring the ideas forward into action in the world, but this may or may not take place. It's the flaw in the system, which I thought used to work fairly well up until that point.#
- I don't mean to idealize the past, since people with a good memory can easily recall no shortage of abominable behavior, but there have been groups of people who have tried to share responsibility for disseminating worthy information online.#
- Fifteen or twenty years ago it was commonly understood that a community of bloggers with a shared interest acted like a team of information screeners. When something was published that mattered to fans of their shared topic, someone in the group would notice.#
- Having noticed, one or more people would skim or read well, comment shallowly or thoughtfully, add a link, and spread the word in the community. If the thing was really promising, a second wave of readers would build on the early notices with further thoughts of their own.#
- There would be arguments of fact and interpretation, and the new item would begin to enter the tested and perhaps taken-for-granted contents of the community's hive mind. It might be improved in the process.#
- Being the blogosphere, traces of the shared work would make their way down the many screens into archives, becoming less useful there as days went by. Some people would have been informed and perhaps energized. Maybe they'd try something new out in the world. Or maybe not.#