Sunday November 27, 2022; 9:03 PM EST
- I requested a zip file of my Twitter history, which I hadn't done for a while. When it arrived, the first thing I did was to scan a good number of the images. I'm happy to say that not too many of them were trivial jokes or worn-out memes--I must have usually been on good behavior when sitting at the keyboard over the years. Hope so.#
- Lots of the quotations in the image files were things of substance, so that was good to see. But they had mostly dropped off my radar, disappearing down the screen into the archive and for the time being forgotten. That's the familiar weakness of social media. No matter what value is served in day-by-day writing and posting practices, good things vanish when the insights they contain are still urgently needed.#
- So it's the old issue. How to make the day-by-day work valuable but sustain the best parts and develop them in new contexts, where they might not only endure but grow in complexity, urgency, and value by being placed with other materials (rather than being forgotten).#
- Part of the solution might be written formats that are made up of smaller units. Some books have small chapters, for example. The New Yorker recently published a longer essay with 26 alphabetically arranged small chapter-lets, let's say. Each one, whether A or B or C or Z, stands alone as a piece of reading, and they don't have to be read in A - B - C order, but together they amount to a more comprehensive account of the topic.#
- So the small posts from the past aren't necessarily a problem in organizing a longer work for them to live in. And when pieces written at different times are put side-by-side, they may suggest a need for new pieces to fill in gaps, say. So that process of organizing old posts may become generative, not just organizational.#