I thought Sonny’s comment re online communities was really important: I think the Bulwark, and more broadly, Substack have done a remarkable job of creating online communities in which people start with enough in common to create communities that actually engage in thoughtful and actual, if occasional, interactive communication online. S…
I thought Sonny’s comment re online communities was really important: I think the Bulwark, and more broadly, Substack have done a remarkable job of creating online communities in which people start with enough in common to create communities that actually engage in thoughtful and actual, if occasional, interactive communication online. So much of what happens on Twitter, for example, feels to me to be broadcasting and then trolling of that broadcast that it seems to have become a 2-strategy universe: tell people about something whose content is really someplace else or STIR THE POT TO GET ATTENTION. The latter now dominates and gets the most attention and, to the degree that it creates what Noah Smith recently called “vertical community,” it is a ‘community’ of people who don’t really want anything like the mutuality that makes for real communication or relationships. It is the world of the same non-negotiable, non-executable declarations that pervades some “political” arenas these days: all pronouncement, no real participation! Like Alyssa, I’m not sure I’d miss Twitter if it collapsed entirely, but I sure would miss the Bulwark and some of my other Substack neighborhoods 😊
I thought Sonny’s comment re online communities was really important: I think the Bulwark, and more broadly, Substack have done a remarkable job of creating online communities in which people start with enough in common to create communities that actually engage in thoughtful and actual, if occasional, interactive communication online. So much of what happens on Twitter, for example, feels to me to be broadcasting and then trolling of that broadcast that it seems to have become a 2-strategy universe: tell people about something whose content is really someplace else or STIR THE POT TO GET ATTENTION. The latter now dominates and gets the most attention and, to the degree that it creates what Noah Smith recently called “vertical community,” it is a ‘community’ of people who don’t really want anything like the mutuality that makes for real communication or relationships. It is the world of the same non-negotiable, non-executable declarations that pervades some “political” arenas these days: all pronouncement, no real participation! Like Alyssa, I’m not sure I’d miss Twitter if it collapsed entirely, but I sure would miss the Bulwark and some of my other Substack neighborhoods 😊