Discovery
Introducing our new series
The slow death of twitter dot com has been in some ways liberating. My days are no longer spent doomscrolling and I have become blissfully unaware of the current discourse that will be forgotten by the time the sun sets. However, one casualty has been the loss of discovery. Having spent years pruning my following, there was a part of my feed filled with interesting writing, recommendations, and thoughts by people far smarter, more interesting, and experienced in fields foreign to me. With our social feeds increasingly governed via algorithm, the ability to exercise choice in the discovery process is a lost art: what is provided is predicated on what you were given before, everything is for you, calcifying who you were before rather than who you might want to be, or who you might become, or just what might be interesting with no relation to your current interests or taste. If meaning-making is brought about by our relationship to different texts, discovery must be part of piecing together the jigsaw of modern life.
At Dilemmas of Meaning, our first aim is to diagnose the disorientation brought about by living in a tech-based world. While this will not be a total solution, offering some aspect of curated discovery can be part of the treatment. Who are we to place ourselves in this position? In truth, nobodies. We hope you are here because you’ve liked our essays and believe in the potential of the project (or you know us personally, hi!) So, like our essays, we will anchor every recommendation with our reasoning for presenting it to you; we will show our working. If you disagree, that is absolutely fine, email us with counter recommendations and start a dialogue. If twitter is to die, I hope we don’t lose the dream of community.
Preamble over, we’re going to be sending out three kinds of discovery:
Footnotes: What we’re reading as part of research for upcoming and potential essays. We’ve been fortunate to find many great and insightful authors and would like to pay it forward;
Bookmarks: Writings, videos, etc., not necessarily anchored to Dilemmas of Meaning essays, but a monthly collection of things that moved either us or a subscriber enough that it was worth sharing;
Wish We Wrote: Stealing this idea from
. This is an expanded form of Bookmarks and Footnotes. We’ll take a piece of writing we loved and explain why.
The first issue of discovery should be out soon. Thank you for subscribing, we hope to repay your faith in us.
Jedidiah and Billy