Thought as a Cyclic Social Process: Thought => Expression => Social Mediation => Impression => ...

[Update 2/14/23: The article this previews is now published on Tech Policy Press.]

This is a preview of ideas from an article in the works, introducing some new diagrams seeking to distill and simplify key ideas addressed in the Delegation Series (with Chris Riley).

Freedom of thought, expression, and impression are not just isolated, individual matters, but an ongoing, cyclic, social process. Thought leads to expression, which then flows through a network of others – a social mediation ecosystem. That feeds impression, in cycles that reflexively lead to further thought.

Cutting through the dilemmas of managing networked speech will depend on balancing full freedom of expression with full freedom of impression, by augmenting the social mediation ecosystem with the right balance of three control points:

• Censorship as posts and responses enter the network, entirely banning users or removing individual posts before they reach anyone at all -- a threat to freedom of expression.
• Selection of what is fed or recommended out to each user, individually -- a threat or exercise of freedom of impression, depending on who controls it.
• Friction and other measures to enhance the deliberative quality of human social mediation activity -- with little threat to freedom of thought.

There is no quick fix to the problems of social media, but we can quickly change course to begin to undo the disaster of the past decade or two -- and to avoid ill-conceived remedies that will fail or make things worse. As shown here, doing that means: 

• relying less on censorship (bans and removals that have questionable legitimacy), and
• giving users agency over the selection of what they see (to legitimately balance each speaker's freedom of expression with each listener's freedom of impression), and
• re-creating a truly open and generative social mediation ecosystem that is like what we have been evolving over the past few centuries of analog society, but now augmented by digital media tech (instead of de-augmented and disintermediated by it).