LINES & NETS

November 25th, 2019

Cast out a line, and you might catch a fish.

Drag a net and you have dinner and money to spare from the rest you can sell.

Each effort we make falls on a spectrum between a line and a net.  Write a short story and send it out for publication and you’re fishing with a line.  Maybe a couple lines.  You are hunting for one taker.  Maybe two.  But strangely, the ultimately goal is to capture the attention of far more people.

But take that same story and put it on a personal website, and share the website with people…

and there’s virtually no limit to the number of people that can visit that website and read that story.  In this way, the website is a bit like a net.  The avenue of distribution fundamentally shifts the possibility of exposure.

Tweets fall on the same place on the spectrum.  A passing thought, if merely captured with a few lines of text can then be sent out into the world and net the attention of hundreds if not thousands of people.

But left to the dark confines of a paper diary, or worse still, the roiling evaporation of the busy mind and it’s likely that only one person will ever know that thought and… eventually, forget it.

As different technologies emerge, they present opportunities on this spectrum between lines and nets.  Lately, the emerging technologies have been geared more towards the net, as it’s far better oriented towards the group, which is the prized catch of any social media platform.

The negatives of technological skew in the direction of the net is now commonplace as it’s spoken about constantly and analyzed  ad nauseum.

But for the individual, it can be an invaluable tool to spread the word of one’s work, one’s art and one’s message.

Just yesterday, Tinkered Thinking casually tweeted a thought that resonated with over 1,500 people, with 500 of them deciding to follow Tinkered Thinking.

Slowly, the Tinkered Thinking experiment spreads that way.

But just imagine how slow this process would be if there was no twitter, if there was no internet, no website and podcast. 

How would all these thoughts get to you?

What are the odds that you never would have found these words, this platform, and these questions that Tinkered Thinking poses to you?