(This post highlights some basic ideas from my prior publications,* and why they are of continuing relevance to social media issues.)
- The idea of a social mediation ecosystem integrating with social media feeds is a re-visioning of how things used to work. Society has been organically building on such sense-making ecosystems for millennia.
- The groups that comprise
the social mediation ecosystem have historically served as a “public
square,” or “public sphere,” ranging from informal gathering places such
as coffee shops and taverns to social and civic associations, the press,
academia, workplaces, unions, faith communities, and other communities of interest.
- This square or sphere is
not unitary but an ecosystem, a polycentric web of interlinked groups in a
multidimensional space.
- Such associations develop norms and contexts for discourse. Our participation in a network of them shapes what we see and hear of the world.
- These processes of social influence nudge us to speak “freely,” but with sensitivity to those norms and values, so others will choose to listen to us.
- Online media technology
can enable restoration of that mediating role through enterprise-class
middleware affordances that support community operation and let users
interact both within and across the diverse communities they opt into.
- Middleware can
facilitate and enrich user-community interactions, and enable us to steer
our feeds to blend content favored by any mix of communities we choose to
include at a given time — depending on our tastes, objectives, tasks and
moods.
- For example, current
curators of news could become attention agent services. Users might select
a set of such services — for example, The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, Fox,
The Atlantic, People — to play a role in composing their feeds, assigning
them different relative weights in ranking. Other groups in the social
media ecosystem, such as civic, political, faith communities and special
interest associations, could also be selected by the user to function as
attention agents. Content ranking inputs could come from each community’s
expert curators/editors or be crowdsourced from the user population that
follows those curators, or from a combination of both.
- Importantly — and as it
has been historically — this ecosystem must be open and diverse, and users
must be able to draw on combinations of many mediation sources to maintain
an open and balanced understanding of the world.
- Many fear that the involvement of independent attention agents or middleware might increase fragmentation and partisan sorting. That may be a concern while there are just one or a few mediators, but being able to selectively combine exposure to many loosely connected communities is how open societies have always limited that ever-present risk.
(*This was first published with minor variations as a sidebar to A New, Broader, More Fundamental Case for Social Media Agent "Middleware" (11/9/23), and then as a sidebar to a more formal Centre for International Governance Innovation policy brief (4/25/24).)
