[ExI] experiment: decreased investment in individual memes...

[spike]

In response to an offlist comment by one of our long-time smart guys, I
wrote this:

 

 

{. stuff deleted.}

 

Note that there has been a shift from scholarly papers to shorter and
less-formal scientific and engineering society papers, to internet group
posts to realtime chat to whatever the young hipsters use a lot now: tweets?


 

Note that the time and thought invested in creating those communications
decreases steadily with each of those steps.

 

The time and thought invested on the receiving end decreases too.  Recall
back when we used to study an article or a book and talk about it a lot for
weeks or months?  Some professional society papers had enormous impact, and
the others in that field kept a copy and spent hours studying it.  In the
peak of internet groups, we had occasional posts or threads which got a lot
of attention.

 

Note Scientific American articles from the 1960s.  Compare to Scientific
American articles today.  It isn't a criticism of the magazine.  Try it: go
look at those old time articles and note that it is damn hard to maintain
concentration on the topic necessary to get thru those today.  Note that we
now have a constant awareness of the opportunity costs associated with
investing a few hours in studying a fifty-year-old Scientific American
article.  Science is faster now.  

 

But what is the counterpart to that in tweets?  

 

I really don't know, for I do not tweet.  It just sounds too undignified.
Furthermore, I really cannot express my thoughts in 37 characters or less
(or whatever the absurd limit is.  I can't do it!  I am too not hip.  I
really mean it: I just can't express myself in haiku-length posts.

 

But hey, I am an open minded sort, so I propose an experiment.

 

Today and tomorrow, let us suspend the usual posting limit for a purpose, to
make a point.  Write in the cramped space allowed by twitter.  (What is it
please young hipsters?)  Haiku is fine, whatever you want, but keep it to
the twitter length limit.  Let us try to discuss philosophy, science, tech,
the usual ExI banter in tweets.

 

Note: back in the old days, we used to discourage one-line responses, for it
encouraged posts with too-little thought.  Now we are temporarily
encouraging it to see what we get as we suffer collective reduction of
attention span.  Today and tomorrow, post away on this topic, within the
twitter character limit, no restrictions.  If you quote previous tweets,
that doesn't count against your limit; only your response needs to be
limited in length. 

 

The usual twitter abbreviations and murder of traditional spellings R L-owd,
N-K-raged even.  R U hip?

 

spike

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20160328/7ccc610e/attachment.html>