Selected Items

Internet Platform Services
--Saving Democracy
--Augmenting the Wisdom of Crowds


Delegation of User Control for Social Media Feed Ranking / Recommender Services (often called "middleware") -- growing interest in a functional restructuring to limit platform power over truth, value, and the democratic way.

Featured
  • From Freedom of Speech and Reach to Freedom of Expression and Impression (Tech Policy Press, 2/14/23) - Distilling and updating essential reframings from the Delegation series (just below). Managing society’s problems related to how (and by whom) social media news feeds are composed is rapidly reducing to the absurd. Focus on the other end of the proverbial “megaphone” – not speaker’s end, but listener’s. Restore our Freedom of Impression!
The Delegation series in Tech Policy Press with co-author Chris Riley
  1. Delegation, or, The Twenty Nine Words that the Internet Forgot (2/28/22)
    Why emphasis on user control in Section 230 is far more important than generally recognized, and how an architecture designed to make high levels of user control manageable can enhance the nuance, context, balance, and value in human discourse that current social media are tragically degrading.
  2. Understanding Social Media: An Increasingly Reflexive Extension of Humanity (4/27/22)
    With a nod to Marshall McLuhan, we connect the centrality of user choice and agency to the deeper social and human substrate that underpins the potential of modern social technologies to bring positive new dynamics into our human interaction.
  3. Community and Content Moderation in the Digital Public Hypersquare (6/17/22)
    Seeing social media as a "digital public square" oversimplifies, and is better seen as a “digital public hypersquare” -- a multitude of digital spaces. Social media must serve an open-ended web of spaces (/squares/spheres), layered & multidimensional, each governed by different rules & norms.
  4. Contending for Democracy on Social Media and Beyond (9/22/22)
    Conflict is part of democracy, and this age of rapid change only promises to accelerate that. Just as democracy is weakened by the prevalence of unhealthy conflict, it is weakened by attempts to suppress healthy conflict that is agonistic, rather than antagonistic.
Other featured items:
Other recent items:
General issues -- Our platforms should serve us, but have take a wrong turn. (See Supportive references below.)
Business model issues -- Specific to user-centered business models for platforms
(See more on my FairPayZone blog)
Other issues in User-Centered Media (to be added...)

(These address my perspectives as an inventor in the media space and related commentary)

Broader issues in in our intertwingled world (to be added...)

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Supportive References for Augmenting the Wisdom of Crowds and The Tao of Truth
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Where I am coming from: The Roots of My Ideas on Tech Policy