This is becoming increasingly clear to me. What makes the news powerful is that it’s both content and discourse at the same time, in different amounts at different times, depending on who’s talking and listening and so on.

A fantastic example: Twitter’s move from the @reply to the @mention fundamentally represents the collapse of the distinction between discourse and content. The @mention is a kind of weak push to the recipient, asking for his attention or speaking to her: “Hey, @username! Yes, I’m talking to you!” This is discourse.¹ And in the meantime, of course, @mentions go out to all the followers of the author of the tweet. Those followers read about the person @mentioned. “Hey, everyone! Yes, I’m talking about @username!” This is content.

This is discourse and this is content—at the same time, depending on who’s reading. Talking to someone and about that same someone is the same thing. And it’s not even horribly rude! Even when it happens in a crowded space!

There is no longer a bright line between those who discuss and are discussed. We are all sources, and we are going direct to one another and about one another at the same time. There is no longer an important distinction. The world is too densely interconnected.

This is, of course, why we care about people: “Sources, celebrities, organizations, businesses, governments, reporters, experts, bloggers, and our friends are all people or newsmakers generally.” We plan to treat them all as equal people from a technical perspective. A user is a person the same way the president is a person, and we think code should reflect that truth. It fits neatly with our vision that the code structuring the news should reflect the fundamental facts about it.

In short, if you want the news about Robert Reich and health care reform, you don’t care whether (1) he’s the author of an article or post about health care reform, (2) he’s mentioned as a source in someone else’s article or post about health care reform, or (3) he’s tweeted, shared, or otherwise passed a link to an article or post about health care reform. It’s all Robert Reich, and it’s all health care reform. Presented in an intuitive UX, that’s what matters—a new kind of conversation composed of discourse and content as two sides of a newly unified kind of communication.

¹ With anything push on the internet, there’s obviously a real danger for spam, which is why twitter.com leaves @mentions from non-friends on a different screen. Twitter clients commonly put such @mentions in a secondary stream. In other words, the ease of discourse isn’t great, which is exactly what makes it work.