One long thread

I read something interesting in Brian Morrissey's newsletter The Rebooting, where he described how a lot of new media companies will resemble two people having a long back and forth thread trying to figure things out. This struck a chord, since I feel like that is the direction this personal blog is going to end up following - essentially, one long thread to myself where I try on new ideas, tie them back to my experiences and use that to make sense of the world and where it's going.

To date, I think that podcasting is the embodiment of what this looks like - a long, unstructured conversation where people are sharing things that are not yet finished ideas. I'm not sure if this exists as much with written word, since books and articles tend to be finished products that are edited together in some kind of cohesive fashion to prove a point. While on the other hand, social media has constraints in the form of a number of characters or limited amount of attention someone is likely to give, where you have to make a point in as little time as possible. This strips out nuance and projects a sense of certainty that is very far from this idea of not having all the answers and trying your best to figure things out.

This puts into words some of the ickiness that I felt as I was trying to optimize my Twitter posts for engagement - the less context and nuance, the better the engagement. And if everyone is optimizing for that, we end up in a place where we have very little authentic or satisfying content. So let's try to be a bit different and part of that is being comfortable with nuance and not having all of the answers.