WHEN YOU’RE BLOGGING IN the era of posting (thank you, reader Matthew of Bellevue Hill) you subject yourself to a few annoying constraints, like not having an easy phone app you can tap your malformed thoughts into, like having an effectively infinite word limit instead of a crisp punchy microblog format, like the knowledge for better or worse that your blog is being archived for posterity. Most of all though when you consider the fundamental shift that happened somewhere around 2014, between writing in the different formats, you realise that microblogging, tweeting, or whatever you choose to call posting, involved a fundamental shift away from obligation.

The President-elect of the United State is posting about prospective military action against both Mexico and Greenland. Is it serious? Should this be taken seriously? Everything is serious and nothing is.

But that’s sort of the game of it. If you take it seriously and react to the statement of the incoming President as though it were the statement of any other President—you’re being overly shrill and can’t take a joke. It sets the expectation that he can just go on stage and say whatever he wants and there’s no actual consequence to it.

But this is not a behaviour that is unique to Donald Trump. It's the fundamental quality of microblog format 'posting' that anything can be said and nothing has to be defended, something that wasn't true of older forms of journalism, or of radio, which were both regulated both at the formal level by real rules, and by an informal culture where there were limits to simply lying, or to insincerity. When posting, on the other hand, there's no obligation whatsoever to the truth or consistency, or anything. ‘Posting through it’ is the characteristic behaviour of the format, which is because it is so postmodern and unmoored from any binding chain to text, allows anything to signify anything. No obligations arise.

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