Notes toward a theory of posting

• Writing is a human* symbolic** meaning-making*** process that involves mediating**** language***** with technology******.
• (Note: All words with asterisks can and should be defined with very long and tortured explanations. Maybe someday.)
• (Also: I've tried to make this definition as expansive as I can, but I realize it is fuzzy. This would include songwriting if you've got a guitar and a fourtrack but don't actually put marks on paper to preserve what you've "written." It would not include "songwriting" if a song is made up using only the human voice. I reserve the right to change my mind.)
• Posting is putting things on the internet in order to garner a reaction or cultivate a "following." Posting includes writing, but is not only writing. A person who writes things for social media platforms -- not just Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and the like, but also Medium, Substack, Blogger (zing) and really anything that has "comments" and "followers," the ability to "re"-something (post, tweet, blog, etc), is not primarily a writer, but a poster. 
• The immediacy of publication, the idea of a 'take' or a response is paramount to posting.
• The "content" of posting is more or less beside the point. Posting is about cultivating "engagement," or an audience for more posting. This is why "AI" is seen as important by people whose livelihoods involve posting, but is not welcomed by people who see their vocation as writing.
• The practice of writing itself does not require an audience other than a putatative Bakhtinian superaddressee - that is, a transcendant guarantor of meaning, even if that is only the faith the writer has in the intelligibility of his or her own writing. Posting requires "followers."
• Writing and posting can both involve things like words, sentences, paragraphs, ideas, and arguments. But posting cannot be separated from its online ecosystem, whereas writing can function in any setting.
• If "the writer's audience is always a fiction," then in posting it is urgently moreseo. A Poster tries to will their audience into being. Posting is for the audience, for the people, for the discourse. Even if there is no one reading. 
• Writing is a craft, posting is a performance.