Maybe Articles Were The Compromise?

Ok, hear me out. What if the best way to experience ideas (generally) is through conversation – hashing things out together, being inspired by other people's thoughts, reaching new thoughts that neither of you had alone?

And the entire history of aritcle-writing was a compromise for the era's technologies: we couldn't have country-spanning conversations, so one person wrote an article and then other people wrote Letters to the Editor in response, and we did our best approximation with what we had?

(I've been reading old magazines from the 30s-80s recently, and the letters pages are full of long ongoing conversations, implemented slowly. Or think about the Republic of Letters, or the Federalist Papers: long conversations carried out in essay form).

It's fun to hate on social media but: what if it has taken over because it's a closer approximation to conversation, and therefore a better way to develop ideas together?

Maybe the issue with social media is just the way it devolves into, well, strangers shouting at each other, and not having a shared trust base, and the ease with which one person (of any agenda) can hijack the whole conversation. But maybe if you build ways around that, it's actually a great way to think?

I've said before that my favourite social media is 5 person whatsapp groups, and I suspect that if I actually tracked such things a lot of my new thoughts in the last few years come out of those simmering soups.

I obviously don't mean this as absolutely as it's written – there's a different kind of deep thought that only happens when one person focuses on one thing for a long time, and then synthesises it all in one place. But still, maybe we've been letting that ideal get in the way of enabling the magic in written conversation as well.