12/20/17
One of my beliefs is that Are.na has potential not just as a researching platform for other projects (blogging, presentation decks, web design, gallery exhibits) but as a publishing platform in its own right, where users are able to present ideas to an audience. One way to do this is to build sort of playlists for ideas, where by assembling text and media documents you're actually making a sort of argument, or presenting a sort of worldview. Another way is by using the container system as a format to stack and structure original fragments of ideas.
I'm tempted to use the word "postmodern" to describe this publishing platform, because there's a way in which things are deconstructed into blocks, but that's actually missing the fundamental mechanism of how Are.na works. What's actually happening is reconstruction, where a bunch of scattered blocks are built into a new structure all of their own.