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.
“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.” But wait, I care a lot. Let’s say I’m trying to learn about Reich’s views on health care or about what reforms he’s pushing for. In those cases, I really don’t want anything from (3); I don’t want my search results polluted with other people’s health care views that just happen to be sent to or shared with Reich. That’s part of the reason I use both the “health care” and “Reich” filters instead of just the “health care” filter.
The idea that (1), (2) and (3) are all the same seems to me a lot like saying that library search engines should not ask you specify whether you want to search “by author” or ‘by subject.” But that specification is super (even perhaps plus duper) helpful? If I want articles about the awards Paul Krugman has won, it’s less helpful to run a search that also pulls up all the articles Krugman himself has written. Likewise, if I want to research what Krugman’s written, it’s not helpful to run a search that also pulls up every article that mentions him in any way.
Sorry for the tardy reply, Ben. It’s poor form as a blogger, I know, and I apologize.
Broadly speaking, though, I think you’re missing the point on maybe two levels.
First level. I resist comparison to libraries. News mostly isn’t libraries. News mostly isn’t scientific research. Which is not to say that news–or what I’ll call “news,” for lack of a better term–is vapid gossip. It ranges between those two extremes. And in that range, I believe we care about what people say and what is said abut them. It’s conversational. See here for background on how a parable of the fishing village can help us reorient ourselves to what’s fundamentally important about the news:
http://networkednews.wordpress.com/2009/04/03/thinking-the-unthinkable-parable-of-the-future-of-news/
My sense is that news is a social thing, a stratum of information in which people form groups, identities, and other bonds. Now, is it all conversation? No, of course not. It’s often research, like that done in a library. But news–again, very broadly speaking–has a special kind of social life that obtains between people around the water cooler or on twitter. That social life is horizontal; it’s one-to-one and one-to-many, very many times over.
Second level. I agree that you don’t want, and can’t handle all of (3)–which, if you recall, comprises health care news that others have shared with Robert Reich, whether via twitter or otherwise. Fine, but you’re (understandably) taking me to be saying more than I really am (don’t worry, I ain’t mad).
So let me be clear(er). I think you do want the health care news to which my tweets that mention Robert Reich point. I think you do want the health care news to which Paul Krugman’s tweets that mention Robert Reich point. In other words, you care about some of (3).
If there were a good way to establish expertise or “trustedness” on a topic (like health care or medicine or politics), you might want health care news to which such experts’ tweets that mention Robert Reich point. And I do think there’s a good way to establish such expertise. In fact, this very system of following does just that. (See tunkrank for background: http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/01/13/a-twitter-analog-to-pagerank/. You don’t lack the math chops.)
The fact that someone reveals a preference for health care news from Paul Krugman indicates that someone trusts Krugman on health care. If you repeat that many times over–i.e., with enough people independently following users A, B, and C on topics X, Y, and Z–you’ve got socially networked content recommendation engine. And that’s pretty cool–far-out, sure, but cool, imho.
I hope this helps a bit!
[...] people? Or asymmetrical relationships? Overlapping publics? The collapse of the distinction between discourse and content? And who isn’t gazing deeply into twitter, looking for what will follow? Brown’s [...]
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