attention industry

Publishing as conversation.

This is the generation of publishing. We can talk about social media, but at core, it’s the mass adoption of publishing and distribution as a part of everyday life, and the creation and acceptance of tools to do so.

This is the biggest shift that companies aren’t understanding: publishing isn’t only about creating a durable state to share information, anymore. Publishing has turned into a form of dialogue, enabled by the speed and ease of creation and distribution.

Blogging, and social networks like Facebook, are akin to traditional publishing, if you ignore the specific means used.  That is to say, content is created, published to make it durable and shareable, and then distributed to an audience, large or small, personal or impersonal. While there is a definite back and forth here (comments, wall posts, private messages) the key focus is publishing and distribution: the framework exists as a bunch of blank spaces for you to input information, and a means to discuss and share that information. But this isn’t the game changing behavior here. This is the application of old behaviors and frameworks across new technologies; the form is new, but the human reaction makes sense once we actually figure out what we’re looking at.

Publishing as conversation is a very different thing. Twitter is an example of this, but so are message boards, the forgotten precursor to social media. These formats are focused on interaction, not about content creation. Publishing is the means of holding the conversation, but durability is an incidental benefit, not one directly tied to the way it is used. THIS is what changes everything; a conversation is now something that can be dissected, analyzed, and distributed on a segmented level. A single tweet is most often part of a wider point, exchange or idea. And we haven’t developed a standard system for tracking the connections and context of these conversations. 

You can look at a Twitter feed as talking with instant replay, of sorts - a conversation or dialogue that let’s you stop at an individual moment, and examine the context, metadata, and responses to that specific element of the whole. This is on par with being able to create annotations on an article and send them to the writer, focused on a sentence rather than the whole.

Think of it as augmented conversation: much as AR is a data layer over reality, letting you add to the seen or felt with digital content and context, reactions and responses to one element of a conversation-via-publishing, expand and explore each individual subunit.

Publishing as conversation means we’ve made stream of consciousness something that can be created, challenged, and sifted through for value. We haven’t figured out how to create great content through publishing as conversation, and we haven’t really figured out how to interpret it, either.

The key point is this. We thought we’d stumbled on to a revelation when ‘internet people’ began noticing that everything is publishing, now. We missed the point entirely, as we always do: publishing no longer means what we thought it did.  Publishing is breaking into many, many little pieces, and the magic is going to be in finding how these flavors of the greater concept influence, and are influenced by, human behavior.