Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
Thinking about what makes media like newspapers, TV, and twitter scratch a very particular “morning coffee” itch of where you go to plug into what’s up in the world. Though TV news is more a PM thing. Other media might be pleasurable (music) or socially satisfying (saying hi to friends) but don’t scratch this
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
There’s differences: newspapers are more summarized, TV is more live snippets, Twitter is a combination: conversational “takes” are summaries+snippets+opinion. But the common feature is, 5 minutes dissipates the claustrophobia of being caught in your own narrow life. All 3 connect you to whole universe.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
I mean that literally, not poetically. Newspapers, TV, and twitter are the 3 places where you can reliably see run into everything from latest JWST photos to latest virus news. I’m going to call these 3 “saltwater media” as in oceans. As opposed to theme/perspective-restricted “freshwater” media.
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Venkatesh Rao ☀️
@vgr
This oceanic feel is a false consciousness of course. You’re still only getting a tiny non-random taste of the universe, with lots of systematic blindness. A Chinese person checking in on WeChat or whatever tastes a different, disconnected ocean with their morning coffee. But it’s a *nice* illusion.
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Steph
@hun3y.eth
Following this logic, what's an example of freshwater media?
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Kyle Mathews
@kam
the early blogging world ~1998-2008 had this feel too. With the extensive interlinking between blogs + a fairly sizable google reader blog list — with a few minutes of clicking around I had the same dissolved in the universe of ideas feel that twitter took to the next level.
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