We need focus, in the current mess. On the #openweb, we need to be clear about what serves us and what distracts us. There’s a growing tendency to blur the lines between what should be public and what should remain private, and this confusion weakens our “native” social fabric. What do I mean by this?
At the core of any healthy communication ecosystem, we need two things: news and the personal. These are not the same. They serve different social functions, reflect different truths, and nurture different parts of our communities.
News is about truth-telling. It’s rooted in shared reality and collective witnessing — what Harold Innis calls the durable structures of “truth.”
The personal is about care and context. It’s about opinion, identity, emotional honesty. It builds relational trust — what we might frame as “careness.”We already have encrypted chat for private and secure group communication. That’s a separate, secure path, and while important, it’s not the same as what we need for a functioning #openweb. Thus, our constant obsessing over more privacy layers for things that should be either news or care-based expression is a distraction, a misdirection that can end in “perversion” rather than protection.
In open paths, the real work is in getting these paths right: Truth (news): Verifiable, public, shared. Careness (personal): Subjective, relational, shared in context. Private: Not hidden in fear, but chosen with intention, things you don’t yet feel safe sharing publicly, and that’s okay.
Then we have a parallel but different story of working in closed activism paths, I don’t talk about this here as it’s not native to the #openweb but a different subject. How we express ourselves along these paths matters. If we confuse them, we break the signal-to-noise ratio that holds #openweb communities together. But if we learn to respect their distinct roles and values, code this respect into our digital reboot, we can build something meaningful, a space where truth, care, and privacy each have their place.
Let’s keep the balance. Let’s compost the noise, not the signal.
