The Agora Phobia
Sean Moore
If a man speaks out in a room where everyone is shouting, does he make a sound?
Agora.
Funny little Greek word. The marketplace. But it meant much more than that to the Greeks. The agora was a place to come together as a community. To hear the news, the gossip about whose goat got into whose yard, whose olive bushes are looking best this year.
For the record, this isn’t first-hand information. I wasn’t there. But the Greeks were pretty good record-keepers. And I’ll certainly take their word for it when it comes to documenting their leisure times.
The point, if there is one, is that this meeting place was a place to share ideas, tell stories, and come together as a community. What started as a matter of practicality – centralizing the commerce to he convenience of shoppers and purveyors alike – became an increasingly powerful tool in democratizing information. The latest news didn’t have to travel to every house in the city; it merely needed to be carried to the agora, where it would be dispersed.
It’s a law of entropy, of information, of matter in general: condense something into a smaller volume, and it will spread much more rapidly.
Twitter, by way of it’s CEO Dick Costolo sees itself as the modern day agora. The resemblance certainly goes beyond the superficiality of being the congregation places, the ‘water-cooler’ of their times. The Internet was a wealth of information, but the newest material took time to surface. Search engines needed to index new material. Writers had to produce that material – pick up stories, find sources, polish, publish. The top stories took time to grow, and few knew about the information until someone big picked it up.
Twitter changed that in truly amazing way. No need to write a post, no need for the news to travel from site to site before being visible. Information only needed to travel as far as Twitter,; and then, almost instantaneously everyone – an everyone on a much grander scale than the agora could ever perform – was informed. Another centralization led to another democratization – suddenly your dentist could be nearly as well informed as your newspaper editor, could even be sharing the news to that very same editor.
Centralization comes with its own issues though. Remember the Agora’s primary purpose? Twitter has one too. As much as it would like to promote itself as a place of real-time discussion and information, Twitter exists to make money. And, coincidentally, the means by which it does so isn’t far off from the original agora – gather enough people together for merchants to make it worth their while.
Yeah. Adverts. Who would’ve guessed it for a free-to-use Internet service? But it goes beyond that. Because there’s more value than just paying for a mention, for a place in the feed, for a impression on the back of your or my eyeball. There’s value to be had in these companies just being there in the first place, always live, always talking. Another channel to shove a brand down your throat.
Now that agora, a discussion place for ideas, for stories, is an awful lot louder. There’s shouting left and right – sorry, what was that, it’s getting a little tough to hear in here, and would you look at that, a chance to win a vacation if only I retweet this post – it’s more crowded now, and that same group you used to talk with suddenly feels a little bit squeezed out.
There’s a counter of course – you have full control, “sponsored” tweets notwithstanding, over what you see and hear; the agora is for you to make.
But rewarded certain behaviors has a strange little way of influencing how systems work as a whole. And make no mistake, Twitter is rewarding this increasing cacophony wholeheartedly. A fever pitch of information numbs their users to the behavior. They accept it, they embrace it, and twitter is all the better for it.
There’s another story of centralizing information that may be a more apt fit. In that one, people came together to share, to create something great out of what they were given, this common discourse. But that power turned out to be too great, and eventually those that came together were torn apart, and made to not understand one another. Without the commonality, what they created quickly fell apart. They grew louder and louder, unable to communicate.
They all just babbled along.