This paper was originally published by the Centre for International Governance Innovation.
The democratization of access to online media is the most transformative change in human discourse since Gutenberg’s press democratized access to the written word — and it is by far the most sudden ever.
New logics to guide governance are urgently needed. “Platforms” are as much the symptom as the cause of current problems. Society faces a socio-technical problem, to be solved by society and technology in concert. At the core of this problem is the cyclical process of thought and discourse. Yesterday’s logic was based on amplifying one-to-many flows, first via the printing press, then via broadcast media. Freedom of expression was pre-eminent — or sometimes balanced, to varying degrees, with the other rights of individuals and society.
The new logic, still largely unrecognized, relates to the radical transformation of how this new medium “mediates” human communication messaging. Media theorist Marshall McLuhan taught that “we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”1 Social media massively accelerate the primal logic of word-ofmouth propagation through each individual and all those they interact with directly or indirectly. This reflexive cycle of thought as a social process, through the stages of expression, social mediation and impression, before feeding back to more thought now happens far more extensively and rapidly.
Continue reading at the Centre for International Governance Innovation.
