Pinned feature (2/14/23):
My latest Tech Policy Press piece distills ideas for reforming how we manage online speech:
From Freedom of Speech and Reach to Freedom of Expression and Impression.
"Everything is deeply intertwingled" – Ted Nelson’s insight that inspired the Web. People can be smarter about dealing with that - in media services, social media, and in society and life more broadly. Technology can augment that -- most notably as the Augmented Wisdom of Crowds (see the Selected Items tab below). The former name, “Reisman on User-Centered Media” still applies: open and adaptable to each user's needs and desires – and sharing in the value they create for users.
My latest Tech Policy Press piece distills ideas for reforming how we manage online speech:
From Freedom of Speech and Reach to Freedom of Expression and Impression.
Despite the efforts of government, academia, and business, there seems to be no adequate solution to the dilemma of managing any-to-any online media at global-scale. This is creating a deepening crisis not only in our political health, but in all aspects of our public health: social, mental, and physical.
How can we maintain freedom of thought while limiting harm from antisocial speech? Democracy is in crisis over who controls what is expressed online -- and what is impressed upon each of us in online feeds and recommendations. What are the legitimate roles of online platforms, government, communities, and individuals in such controls, and how does that depend on community and context? There are numerous efforts and proposals, many with significant support, but each has serious limitations.
It recently struck me that three key solution elements that I have been advocating for many years have an importantly synergistic effect. I have become all too familiar with the objections that have limited uptake for each -- and now see that the way to counter those concerns is to clarify and build on how these pillars work in combination – to reinforce one another and serve as a foundation for the full suite of remedies.
I offer this as a significant broadening of common thinking about "middleware" services (intermediaries between users and platforms) -- in a way that makes it far more powerful and important to civil discourse, and counters various concerns that have hindered its acceptance as a way to preserve democracy in the online era.
Middleware can support three essential pillars of discourse that synergize with each other to restore the human context that platforms have collapsed:
1. Individual agency (the current focus)
2. A social mediation ecosystem (now seen apart, fragmentary, even conflicting)
3. Reputation (now considered only in basic form).
In preparation for a more formal exposition of this strategy, here are some brief notes and a deck that outlines what I suggest.
Three pillars
The three pillars that synergize to restore human context as a foundation for managing online discourse are:
My primary focus here is “social” media – in its broadest sense. But this also applies to hybrids of human and artificial intelligence (AI).
Context collapse
A key reason why online discourse is so problematic is that global any-to-any networks generally collapse the subjective mutual understanding of context -- who is speaking to what intended audience in what way. This has been understood as “context collapse.” These three pillars work together, through middleware, to restore this lost matrix of context, thus making the particular and subjective nuance of online discourse more understandable to both humans and algorithms. I suggest that can counter the feared pitfalls of each alone.
The broader need for middleware
As a long-time advocate for user agent middleware, I have seen it gain support with a primary focus on restoring the pillar of user choice and agency, but generally in ways that are narrowly centered on that, and open to important concerns. I now see the need to emphasize the synergy of each pillar with the other two more clearly – and to make the case that user agent middleware can and must support all three pillars as they work in concert - individual agency, social mediation, and reputation. The hope is that will provide a far more powerful benefit, and counter the common objections arising from narrower framings.
That might lead to much broader uptake of this important strategy for reestablishing human context that I believe can provide a strong foundation for cutting through current dilemmas, using these and other supplementary strategies to enable online discourse of all kinds to have a far more positive influence on society, and sustain democracy -- for both individual and collective welfare.
The fundamental synergy is the dialectic of a flexibly optimized blend of human freedom gently balanced by a degree of social nudging toward responsibility. Underlying that synergy is the collective wisdom that humans embed in reputation. Middleware is the technology that supports this traditional human context in the online world of computer-mediated discourse. Think of it as contextware.
Working notes on this thesis -- a deck
As I begin to socialize this strategy, in preparation for a more formal presentation, I am sharing this working version of a deck to explain these elements in more detail, including how they work together, and how all three are facilitated by middleware as the underlying connector -- and so can together counter objections commonly raised in response to each when considered individually.
(The deck can be viewed on Google Slides without a Google account here.)
Feedback on this is invited (intertwingled [at] teleshuttle [dot] com).
(Updated 11/30/23)
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*How does a social mediation ecosystem work in social media? The groups that comprise the social mediation ecosystem have historically served as a public square, or public sphere, ranging from informal gathering places like coffee shops and taverns, social & civic associations, the press, academia, churches, unions, workplaces, and other communities of interest. Such associations develop norms and contexts for discourse, and our participation in them shapes what we see and hear of the world.