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The problem isn't that social media provides us with tools of mass amplification. The problem is that those tools are too few.
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Which is to say, the amplification effect isn't bad, but the bias of the tools of amplification against professionals is harmful.
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Only Facebook theoretically includes professional tools of amplification for its network, and even than not really.
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The central thesis is supposedly that gatekeepers are bad, so lets demolish them, but in practice, the results are far different...
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The current structure of social network optimizes for individual citizens, but in doing so it optimizes against expertise.
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Social networks that are built to amplify individuals past gatekeepers also hurt individuals who build expertise not on those networks.
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If you spend all day doing scientific research, you're not well equipped to use amplification tools as well as someone who just does social
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In our original media structure, professional media provided the counterbalance to individual conversations and beliefs.
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In this way, the amplification effects of the water-cooler were balanced by professional media amplifying experts. But balance has broken
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A central methodology of social networks is to amplify humans over organizations. This has continually held true...
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The water-cooler crowd is louder than experts. But also no longer sufficiently amplified, the expert amplification is selected against.
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In other words: the natural form of our modern social networks is anti-intellectual, anti-expert. It promotes--enshrines--this as a method
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We used the wrong metaphor: it isn't just gatekeepers & kept. There's also amplification & amplified. 2 sets intersect but are not the same.
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The media landscape is clearly broken, but a big reason is because, without the capability to amplify experts to the level of your buds...
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Social networks force media to become the things your water-cooler amplifies. Expertise has no special tools of amplification
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So this problem is worth examining from another angle. The solution will never ever be forcing social networks to de-amplify someone.
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Instead the solution must be to provide additional tools of amplification.
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We have to find ways to hit information networks harder, outside of their rules we have to build new, modern, tools of mass amplification.
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These tools can't just be to impact social networks, but that *has* to be part of it, which means:
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That the needs of media are counter to the primary metaphor of social networks. We can fix them, but they will never help us in our efforts.
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If you want to know what tools your media co should be building, the answer is: get massive, cheaply. New mass amplification breaks rules.
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The new tools of mass amplification have to break the rules because the rules are built on bad assumptions. The rules are anti-intellectual.