There are three bastions guarding our mental health – three echelons of filters that sift the contents of the Internet for us: 1) personal settings; 2) the Viral Editor; 3) algorithms of relevance.

Emancipation of authorship has this incidental effect: the audience itself becomes the author. The very same people – meaning people with identical, equal status – not only receive socially significant information, but produce it. Informational peer-sourcing has gone beyond the limits of the communal sphere and has reached the scope of public affai

The informed have higher status than the uninformed. The informative is above the informed. I share, therefore I am significant. If you don’t yet know something that has meaning for everyone, you’re a loser.

Dunbar’s number plays a certain role in the ensemble-like interaction of the large number of participants on the web. Robin Dunbar, in his research into the brains of primates and the organisation of groups,[54] determined the number of constant social connections that human is capable of maintaining. This number is on average 150 contacts (100 to

But now, all of a sudden, thanks to the Internet, more than 2 billion people have free access to public authorship. In the space of approximately twenty years – the blink of an eye, historically speaking – more authors have appeared than during the previous 6,000 years of literary civilisation. (By authors I mean people capable of publishing their

The more publicators there are, the further this free, unrestricted publishing descends towards the bottom of the social pyramid. And what emerges is an unprecedented horizontal, vertical and diagonal mobility of interpersonal relations. Everyone has access to everyone and everything. A huge number of people whose judgments previously extended no w

The user’s main goal is to elicit a response. This personal yearning for a response is the motivation behind the entire system. While weak on the individual, “atomic” level, for large arrays of users this motivation creates strong forces that nourish the Viral Editor’s work.

Paid content presumes the most valuable things should be closed. The web presumes the most valuable things should reach whomever they are of relevance to; that they should and will.

In order to take part in the viral editing, users must be able to perform a wide range of complex intellectual operations. They should be able to: a) read, b) understand, c) evaluate, d) write, e) invest some of their own passion (if nothing else, by the very fact of their reposting).