William Gibson comments about his own blog’s message board: “…while I’ve sometimes been tempted to comment on more threads more directly, I continue to think that that would turn into exactly the sort of tar-baby timesink that keeps books unwritten, so I don’t. It’s really all about *you*, a conglommerate of mediated selves in your own right. Is it a Relevant Experiment? You decide.“
Gibson captures in a nutshell why communities around an Entity—whether an author, a cartoonist, or a software company—are only as strong as (a) their participants and heavy posters, and (b) their subjects’ capability for staying out of the way.