David Carr has a good piece in the NYT: Why Twitter Will Endure. I’m less certain about Twitter per se but Carr makes some excellent points about how easy it is to underestimate the value of short, apparently trivial tweets of ideas and information – especially when we see them connected into a stream and can see patterns.
As I’ve written about before, we have a series of cognitive biases that makes us think ideas come in leaps on insight from specific, gifted individuals. I think the reality is that thinking is a way more social process where notions of ownership are actually way muddier than intellectual property law would have us believe. I could even speculate that our language traps our thinking by having the word idea as a noun, as something that can exist separately from its social context.
Hat tip: Dominic Campbell tweet
