An aspect of the blogosphere that the twittersphere, newslettersphere, and fedisphere have never reproduced is that writing was a collective activity even as it was unstructured and individual. 1/

there were people whom, as a matter of course, i would read and have a high probability of responding to or referencing. they had the same relationship to me. it was essential to all of us, therefore, that we mostly read one another. to the rest of the world, a relationship with any of us was indirectly a relationship with all of us. 2/

we had no formal name as a tribe or team, and we were not a tribe or team at all, in the sense that what bound us was our shared interests and a kind of mutual respect, not alignment or agreement. on the contrary, our disagreements were what drove our conversation, our collective enterprise. 3/

but we did have a social identity, collectively, despite our diffuse and inchoate nature. we constituted an institution (if there was a name it was "econoblogosphere"), rather than just a bunch of individuals self-expressing. 4/

this morning i found a long piece by someone whom i would have read then, and perhaps responded to or referenced in my own writing. as part of that ethos, pieces tended to be shorter then, shards of conversation rather than independent essays. still, i found myself saying "maybe later" (always a tenuous claim) rather than buckling down. it's no longer my project, our work together. 5/

i'm just another content consumer, making a decision do *i* want to read this?

probably not.

death too is a kind of equilibrium. /fin