Perhaps it is no longer reasonable to expect people to read 400 pages of anything? Perhaps richness can be added to a topic by being able to see a trail from the present comment, backwards, including all the things people have said which leads up to, or preceeds the present comment. There may or may not be any apparent connection. As with email, or with Facebook.
Perhaps my PhD writing could represent social networking structure in some way? It already does by being a whole lot of brief chunks of text.Perhaps it could contain links? Or photos, or things in some other medium than words.
Chatting with Julie Bytheway today- she mentioned a bok made to loook like Penguin Classics, called Twitterture. In this book there are backward trails. She also mentioned a stream of interesting ideas called Tedtalks, which are on Utube. Apparently he talks about whether Social networking has made people more honest because eerything is in public.