(2015-07-27) Caulfield Adopting A Library Metaphor For Sharing

Mike Caulfield: Adopting a Library Metaphor for Sharing. The idea of affinity posting is you post not to spread information or start a discussion, but to demonstrate your membership in certain affinity groups.

There’s nothing wrong with affinity posting

Where it gets complicated is where we begin to confuse affinity for other things.

The reason people retweet things like this is to say, more or less, “Hey, this is who I am.”

We say “Retweets do not equal endorsements”, but the very fact we have to say that proves the point.

I think affinity posting as an interaction model is lousy and keeps the web in an infantile state.

I’ve been thinking about an alternate way of thinking about re-posting the things of others: the metaphor of a personal library. (Stream/Flow Vs Garden/Stock)

When I look at someone’s library, I don’t ask “Is this book correct?” or “Do you really agree with this person?!?” Instead, I ask “Is this worth reading? Why?”

In a digital world where storage cost is minimal, and pointing a link is free, the standards for inclusion are bound to be lower.

this is the model we are starting to look at for fedwiki, to answer the question of “What does it mean when I fork something?” It doesn’t really mean “like” and it doesn’t map on to the current cultural semantics of reblogging and retweeting. To others it should signal that you think the thing forked is useful.

If you want another example of how thinking about distributed personal libaries is helpful to conceptualizing the web of the future, see Bret Victor’s Web of Alexandria. ((2015-05-24) VictorTheWebOfAlexandria)