Monday August 14, 2023; 8:20 AM EDT
- A search is 1) a way of saying, "I want to know what's being said by this person, or about this topic, or on this site." A standing search is 2) a way of saying, "I'm going to ask that question and run that search everyday. Please automate the process for me and deliver the results by email." An RSS feed is 3) a way of saying, "Yes, please automate that general search-and-delivery process for all the people who take an interest in what we're producing over here on our site." An RSS aggregator is 4) a tool for asking, "Please gather all the RSS feeds that I care about in one place. If you can, make it easy for me to group the feeds by topic." The news product produced (for example) by at least one aggregator is 5) a way of saying, "I've gone to the trouble to organize RSS feeds usefully by topic, and there are probably people out there who share my interests, so I'm offering my best shaped, curated bundle of RSS feeds on a single screen for folks who share those interests."#
- Items 1), 2), and 4) are, I think, about the private consumption of news.#
- Items 3) and 5) are, at first glance, about recognizing the efficiency of serving a whole crowd of like-minded people in their individual private consumption of news. (Maybe more than that, not sure . . .)#
- Politics and political activism, however, are about getting increasingly well-informed and like-minded people to recognize each other and come into a real or virtual room together to do some work, to refine their understanding, to create content or activities in the world together, to have enough identity to allow them to affiliate with other groups and deepen the power of their voices accordingly.#
- If I'm right -- not sure I am -- then standing searches and RSS feeds in the formats we most often see them are tilted to some degree in the direction of individual consumption, while activism needs information flow to tilt some of the time in the direction of explicit opportunities for affiliation and collaboration. And maybe I'm asking a perfectly good Phillips head screw driver to serve as a pipe wrench here, I don't know.#