So I’m newly willing to accommodate dress up crowd if I can do so easily. You want nice print volume, I’ll try to oblige.
But there’s now a new medium/message coupling problem. Half my content *can’t* play dress-up easily even if it wants to.
Twitter is the big example.
Conversation
I’ve promised myself I’ll publish a book of threads once this meta-thread hits 100. Thanks to I now have a shortlist of ones I may have missed. But I’m dreading it because pulling even threads (which are less conversational) out of twitter feels like taxidermy.
Quote Tweet
I think it’s time to start making my thread of threads and begin reeling in my dissipated brain.
1. Boundary intelligence twitter.com/vgr/status/915…
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This is not a new problem specific to twitter btw. All flow publishing lives in an intimately entangled conversational context. The only reason my blogs and newsletters have even been ebook friendly that I never wrote in “catalyze huge comment threads” ways.
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For comment heavy blogs, losing the comments context is similar to losing the reply/quote context of twitter. Even if you manage to navigate shaky copyright issues (rights to publish comments or twitter replies) how do you actually “dress up” that content in suits and ties?
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We kinda solved this problem in an anthology we published off webzine content in 2001, pre-blog: include a selection of comments after articles. A painful editorial task. I produced this book (I was an editor at what was then a webzine… sulekha).
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But the solution was a weak one. Fundamentally, turning flows into stocks is a highly lossy process. The faster the flow, and the tighter the REPLs underlying it, the more lossy it is. Printing twitter threads is like 70% lossy. Printing blogs is like 50% lossy. Newsletters, ~20%
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Of course old media books and papers are flow-to-stock too. A paper is the end result of a bunch of collaborating academics working together with whiteboards, meetings, and emails. But that doesn’t feel lossy because it was ephemeral to begin with.
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Unlike twitter or blogs, most oral conversations/video conferences aren’t recorded. Most whiteboard states aren’t photographed for posterity. Most email and text messages isn’t preserved. You can’t “lose” what had little to no archival potential to begin with.
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Revealingly, I photograph most of my whiteboard scrawls, most recently directly into Roam 😆
I use digital notes where possible, though paper notebooks are still a big part of working notes (because I like to draw/diagram/math in ways that are still not easy even on iPad/pencil)
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With straight to roam workflow, often
Before when it went into generic photo black hole, almost never
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Yeah that almost a blanket problem irrespective of any tool — don’t believe the problem/solution is tool-process centric?

