When we think about the flow of knowledge, it’s tempting to think that all information is created equally.

For example:

When a book spends 600 pages weaving you though a magical story about how “Americans have lost faith in ancient gods, only to replace them with Technology and the State1”, you internalize that idea. The story, and the characters, leave a mark on your psyche. Sometimes that mark is permanent.

But when someone simply tweets “Americans don’t believe in god, they believe in technology”, you may nod in intrigue, but you will surely keep scrolling. The idea leaves no trace.

The two messages contain the same fundamental truth. Yet, the medium is what signals to us—the reader—whether or not to take an idea seriously. 

Same information. Different medium. Very different impression.

1 Big Idea or 1,000 Small Ideas

When an idea is written as a tweet, created as a TikTok, or manifests as an Instagram post, we know it is just one of many.

A creator, on any of these platforms, has unlimited resources. They can post the most fleeting of ideas, thousands of times per day (hell, they’re even incentivized to do so).

As a result, digital information is ephemeral. It’s not meant to last, only to satiate us until the next post, which is coming up fast. By design, digital ideas are small ideas. 

Imagine you’re publishing your first book. Not an e-book, but a real deal, hardcover work. Imagine the years of research and refinement. The months of toil, turning ideas over in your head, night after night. Follow that with relentless rounds of editing and feedback from your publisher.

How many of these could you create in a lifetime? A dozen? Two dozen if you were really prolific?

In the course of a lifetime, a master writer can only transmit 24 big ideas.

If you could only communicate 24 ideas to the world in your lifetime, how carefully would you consider them? How long would you work to make sure they were robust? How deep would your conviction be for each one of the 24?

In contrast, the digital world has a remarkable fluidity to it, one that’s not afforded to other mediums. This fluidity untethers an author from the constraints of conviction. When you’re afforded unlimited posts—and therefore unlimited ideas—there is no need for conviction. One day you can believe one side of an argument, while tomorrow embodying the opposing view.

In this way, digital creation is perfect for creatives trying to find their voice, or spark an initial interest from the crowd. However, it is terrible for relaying ideas with conviction.

You can delete a tweet. You can’t easily delete a book. 

Which brings us to the least ephemeral works of all. Ancient and lasting by design. These are works written in stone.

The Code of Hammurabi

Carved on a towering black basalt tablet—which weighs over 8,000 pounds—are the 282 laws that ruled ancient Mesopotamia. These laws are dated to 1,700 B.C., meaning that, they were responsible for guiding humanity for nearly two millennia before Jesus took the reigns.

King Hammurabi—the ruler of Mesopotamia—dictated these laws in excruciating detail. Carefully considering the longterm implications of each word as he spoke. He described, scrupulously, how men should act in nearly any situation, knowing that these laws would be his legacy. They would live on to rule his people, long after he perished. As an result, this tablet became somewhat of a Mesopotamian Constitution, and the origin of the phrase “an eye for an eye”.

Now you might be thinking, “Well they wrote it in stone because that’s all they had!”

Not quite.

Believe it or not, they were writing on papyrus—a far more ephemeral medium, much closer to paper—at least 3,000 years prior to the birth of Hammurabi.

Papyrus was easier to produce, transport, and transcribe, than 8,000 pound blocks of basalt. And yet, for the most important document in all of Mesopotamia, they chose stone. 

You write things for posterity in stone.

Several weeks with an idea, or several seconds

We take subtle cues from the medium in which knowledge is transmitted. Bytes, paper, and stone act as signals to our unconscious mind. They relay information, letting us know how much effort an author put in the ideas we’re about to receive.

When a signal appears to be effortful, or minds respond in kind.

We’ll dedicate several weeks to reading a single complex idea written by Seneca or Ernest Hemingway, because we know they have spent several years—if not decades—considering the information they’ve chosen to relay to us.

In contrast, we’ll spend several seconds—even when written by a brilliant source—considering an idea online.

We spend weeks reading books, and moments reading bytes. 

Our brains match effort for effort.

Today’s article is brought to you by Learning, or Creativity, or Retention, or Posterity. Your choice.

But I urge you to consider these three questions:

If the information we consume is the raw ingredients of our knowledge, then what does it mean when the majority of the ideas we consume are ephemeral? 

How does that effect our creativity? 

Do small ephemeral ideas, beget small ephemeral ideas?

I’d wager so.

—Zac