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The Distortion Is Inherent in the Signal

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Henry Farrell has a recent post on how "We're getting the social media crisis wrong". I think it's pretty much on target --- it'd be surprising if I didn't! --- so I want to encourage my readers to become its readers. (Assuming I still have any readers.) But I also want to improve on it. What follows could have just been a comment on Henry's post, but I'll post it here because I feel like pretending it's 2010. Let me begin by massively compressing Henry's argument. (Again, you should read him, he's clear and persuasive, but just in case...) The real bad thing about actually-existing social media is not that it circulates falsehoods and lies. Rather it's that it "creates publics with malformed collective understandings". Public opinion doesn't just float around like a glowing cloud (ALL HAIL) rising nimbus-like from the populace. Rather, "we rely on a variety of representative technologies to make the public visible, in more or less imperfect ways". Those technologies shape public opini

The Distortion Is Inherent in the Signal Three-Toed Sloth Slow Takes from the Canopy (My Very Own Internet Tradition) January 22, 2025 Main The Distortion Is Inherent in the Signal Attention conservation notice : An overly-long blog comment, at the unhappy intersection of political theory and hand-wavy social network theory. Henry Farrell has a recent post on how "We're getting the social media crisis wrong" . I think it's pretty much on target --- it'd be surprising if I didn't! --- so I want to encourage my readers to become its readers. (Assuming I still have any readers.) But I also want t

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