"Like math, recurrent neural networks, big data and protocols, email digests are unreasonably effective. There's a massive asymmetry between the time, energy and expense required to produce them, and the value added for the producer, the recipients and the cultural landscape at large. And that was before Subset came along and made this asymmetry even more pronounced."
https://paragraph.xyz/@subset/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-email-digests

New @paragraph post enumerating the reasons for the unreasonable effectiveness of email digests. Three of my personal favourites...

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New @paragraph post enumerating the reasons for the unreasonable effectiveness of email digests. Three of my personal favourites...
https://warpcast.com/msms/0xd104b8c1

In motion - complex systems, computing and communication (amongst other things) | msweet.net | working on /subset

Serendipitous encounters: "When something's included in a digest, the producer is signalling that X is sufficiently interesting. As a result, there'll be instances of recipients responding to that signal of interest. Sometimes it'll be agreement. Sometimes it'll be disagreement. Sometimes it'll be recommendations to other similar things, or queries about the context you provided. Those serendipitous counter-responses are one of the most valuable outcomes of email digests because they lead to unexpected relationships and opportunities."

An archaeological record: "Sustained over time, a digest presents an interrogable archaeological record. Take an individual. It's likely that, over a span of years, they will evolve as a person. An email digest cannot represent that shifting totally, but it does capture subtle changes in how those shifts come about. It embodies the shape of someone's attention over time and thus provides insight into the self behind that attention. The same can be said for an entity or organisation: a digest mapped to it becomes a proxy for its evolution through time and space and culture."

Attention shaping: "An email digest shapes how one pays attention. It acts as an attentional brace, guiding the flows of one's perception. Even if the digest's scope is everything the producer is interested in, the act of production looming in the future refactors the present. It compels attentiveness in a compassionate, non-coercive way. And because attention, like energy, is curiously non-zero sum, the more you use it, the more you have to deploy and the better your ability to use it becomes. Once that loop begins to hum, then one's improved attentional capacity flows over to other aspects of one's life."