I read maybe 10 articles a day, more if I’m lucky and/or disciplined. Some immediately stand out. Where you can’t just highlight one sentence, you find yourself highlighting paragraphs. And saving excerpts and creating reminders to re-read it at a later date. This is one of those.
https://paragraph.xyz/@whitney/internet-improv
Excerpts below:
—
It’s the first borderless stage in human history—a place where five billion people are simultaneously performing and watching, creating and consuming, every second of every day. What we call “platforms” are really just different parts of this endless stage, each with its own unwritten rules of performance.
—
When you post a photo, share a thought, or leave a comment, you’re not just communicating—you’re making an offer to the world’s largest improv show. Every response is a “yes, and,” every remix a new scene, every trend a collective performance that nobody planned but everyone helped create.
—
At the micro level, it’s how memes evolve. Someone posts an image, another adds a caption, a third person changes the image slightly. Each step is a “yes, and,” and the result spreads across the internet, spawning countless variations.
—
At the top of the stack, individual performances combine into something greater than their parts. A hashtag becomes a movement, a meme format becomes a new way of thinking, a coding pattern becomes an industry standard. This is where Internet Improv shapes not just content, but culture itself.
—
This interplay between layers creates powerful feedback loops. A simple technical feature like the retweet button (Layer 2) can transform how social movements mobilise (Layer 5), which in turn influences how platforms design their viral mechanics (Layer 2). The rise of reaction videos (Layer 4) didn’t just change content creation (Layer 3)—it fundamentally altered the architecture of video-sharing platforms (Layer 2).