Doing the Rounds Again
A BBC interview with biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey - from way back in the dark ages of late 2004 - is once more making the rounds of the vast interconnected conversation of the blogosphere, social news networks and attention aggregators. This whole distributed process by which older content fountains up once more for a brief period is quite fascinating, as I noted the last time it happened for this article:
In the past few years the traditional print world focus on new, fresh content has come to overwhelmingly dominate the online spaces, thanks to the popularity of sequential publishing models; RSS, blogs, aggregation and default searches orded by date. That said, popular link sites or pseudo-news sites (Slashot, Digg, Metafilter, so forth) can cheerfully buck this trend and point out older content that might be fresh for a given audience. That audience will then respond by reading, reprinting, discussing and linking to the older content for a while....
The Digg audience found this compelling, and I don't blame them; it is pretty damn compelling. As I pointed out yesterday, while the concepts of radical life extension are old hat for transhumanists and other healthy life extension advocates, they remains uncharted territory and new news for the vast majority of people.
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People find radical life extension compelling, and rightly so. The mini-wave of interest in this BBC interview was accompanied by a mini-wave of donations and inquiries to the MPrize for anti-aging research and Methuselah Foundation - that is a hopeful sign.
This time too - the rate at which new members have joined the The Three Hundred and new donations in support of rejuvenation research arrived at the Methuselah Foundation has risen in the past few weeks. I'm always pleased to see more people taking the time to learn about the prospects for healthy life extension in our lifetimes, achieved through scientific research and the new tools of biotechnology.
The vigor of this information dredge and recirculation mechanism seems - to my eye at least - to be a better measure of interest in and effectiveness of communication strategies than a response on initial publication. The question presently in my mind is why this particular BBC article returns again and again. Why not any of the many other interesting, well-written and informative interviews, profiles and articles on de Grey and his Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) that are presently available online? What is it about this article that makes it so compelling, so effective at education and raising awareness? There is something to be learned here for those of us who would like to see healthy life extension science discussed and supported far more widely than it is at present.
Technorati tags: advocacy, life extension, SENS