4. Rebuttals and responses.
This is the fourth post in a seven-part series about Distance, a quarterly journal for long essays about design. Support Distance on Kickstarter. Earlier posts:
When an essay is released into the wild, its life begins. People read it; then they say something about it. It used to be that you would handwrite a letter to the editor and send it in the mail. These days, though, commentary takes the form of content on the internet, ranging from emails to comments to blog posts to tweets. But that is just the first step. People can respond to the responses; authors can think about these responses, and revise their own work accordingly. That’s how discourse works, and I think it’s a very good thing. And while this all sounds pretty elementary, it’s hard to get right, to encourage new ideas and insights. With Distance, I want to support and nurture it however I can.
When a new issue is released, I’ll be paying attention to what people say about it. If a response is thoughtful or insightful, I’ll reach out to its author and ask them to reprint or excerpt it. Each of Distance’s issues will have a digital edition, and bundled with this (and posted to the issue’s page on Distance’s site) will be an ever-increasing, forever updated corpus of interesting commentary from other people. Anybody will be able to respond, including the authors themselves, so hopefully this will create an interesting conversation with many different threads. Distance’s essays are meant to last, so the longer they’re in the wild, more discussion will accumulate around them.
I think this is a great way to moderate a conversation around big questions, and I graciously hope you’ll participate.
