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Interesting conversation with a writer friend earlier about the fragmentation of information. We both agreed that fragmentation isn't actually a bad thing - what's missing & needed is better threading. Twitter threads are a specific instantiation of a solution to bigger problem
What would be ideal, I think, is if all information could be represented as "cards", and all cards could be easily threaded. Every book, every blogpost, every video, even songs, etc - all could be represented as "threaded cards". Some cards more valuable than others
In a way, a lot of what I've been trying to do with my personal knowledge management, notetaking, etc is to assemble an interesting, coherent, useful thread of thread of threads, of everything I care about. A personal web of data, w interesting trails& paths I can share w others
I have a huge, sprawling junkyard mess of Workflowy notes, Evernote cards, Google keep cards, Notes, blogposts, etc etc ad infinitum. Buried in there are entire books worth of interesting+useful information. But it suffers from bad or non-existent threading, constrained by memory
Good conversations with smart friends introduce useful filters & queries that inspire novel+useful threads. The eagerness to be useful to a friend can have this really great forcing function when "pulling" fragments from your mind. I excitedly share relevant Twitter threads IRL
One of my personal conclusions was that it's really helpful to always, always take notes after any noteworthy experience - whether watching a movie, talking with a friend or even just going about your daily life. (Seth Godin's observational blogposts come to mind)
This habit yields insane benefits over time. You learn. You develop a fingertip feel for what is interesting+useful. You start to get better at processing all your experience and hanging all of that effectively onto your personal, shared web of knowledge
You also start to look more and more like a genius because you can build off of past experiences, thoughts and insights to assemble really extensive, thoughtful responses to anything. Relevant links, studies, blogposts, etc are all just a quick search away, eager to contribute
(Riffing) A life is a thread of experiences A social graph is a thread of friends A sentence is a thread of words Reality is a thread of cause-and-effect events A worldview is a thread of beliefs A science is a thread of experiments A scene is a thread of practitioners
If I were looking to be a musician in 2018, I would experiment with optimizing each song to fit into existing popular+actively-updated playlists. Once you do that well for a while, you develop currency and credibility as an artist
A thing that frustrates me about @Twitter is that I can't edit old threads. I don't actually need to edit individual tweets - I'd just like to be able to easily splice existing tweets into existing threads, move them about, reorder them, etc. Lots of potential value here