Re-reading Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics.

Strikes me that social media are stochastic, out-of-order multiplayer comics. You don’t know what panel you’ll get next from which comic. You can’t assume people are reading all your panels or in the intended sequence. Or that meanings won’t be destabilized by algorithmic interleaving of other people’s comics. I have no idea what will show up above or below this note in the feed for a given person.

There’s room for a new kind of algorithmic feed that treats the panels similarly to a GenAI token sequence. Though tweet-sized fragments aren’t like language tokens and inhabit a higher-order space. But you could project down. Into a small synthetic token space of sentiment x topic for eg, and treat each post as an implicit prompt for what you want to see next.