How does criticism make contact with power in a platform age?

We know how this was at least supposed to work in the Old Media age. En route to the Home and Garden section of the newspaper, Joe Citizen sees the corruption scandal on the front page. Presto: a story which only a niche audience would seek out gains huge political force and mass awareness.

Holding aside the conspiracy theories about Google or Facebook deliberately using their muscle to swing elections, it’s much less clear how this function is supposed to work in the wilds of Platform land.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I’m a sometime critic of algorithmic media whose TED talk on the topic relied heavily on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to reach its audiences. Amazon has sold, well, not a ton of copies of my book, but more than anyone else. The author of that New York Times Amazon piece introduced me to my book agent. And I run a media site, Upworthy, that’s heavily focused on social media and has the mission of drawing attention to socially important topics. So I am, like, right in the thick of all this. And of course I find it all About As Serious As It Gets.

There’s a targeting problem here.

One of the major tensions: Platforms get to algorithmically determine size and shape of the public that people reach through them.

Herrman may rely on Facebook to get his pieces in front of an audience, but I’ll wager $10 that algorithmically he’s reaching more East Coast Worriers than West Coast Coders — although the latter are the audience that his questions are mostly aimed at. (Maybe that’s why we’re here on Medium? And what does it mean that this discussion itself is, in part, a PR effort by a platform eager to demonstrate its philosophical bona fides? I digress…)

If criticism needs to reach power to be effective, power is increasingly bifurcated. Changing legal regulation requires one apparatus; shaping the way digital environments regulate behavior requires another one; both matter a great deal but are very different discourses and publics. In this context, Bezos’ purchase of The Washington Post looks smarter and smarter.

It’s also worth saying: Media criticism works because it hurts. What are the arguments that land with the Platform Builders? It’s not surprising that ”you’re putting us out of a job” doesn’t resonate deeply in the Valley — in a way, that’s validation that there’s Disruption At Work. But those critiques also distract from the deeper conversation around purpose and philosophy that we all really need to have.

Meanwhile, in the mass public…

This dialogue is especially important because the aspirational rhetoric of new media doesn’t match the measurable reality, at least where citizenship is concerned.

In this age of connectedness and infinite information, citizens in the U.S. don’t, on average, know much more about social and political topics than they did in the 1990s. That’s kind of crazy! Here’s Pew’s roundup of the effect of the early-to-mid Internet era, and the panel results since then show the same roughly flat line.

Of course, the topics we know about may be different. Certainly, Black Lives Matter wouldn’t have captured the national conversation as dramatically if it hadn’t been fueled by Twitter and shareable video (though of course, the civil rights struggle 60 years ago did so).

On the one hand, this is a good reminder for the wringiest of the hand-wringers: All is not lost, and somehow, despite image macros and GIFs and emojis, people continue to find their way to democratically actionable information.

On the other: What a bummer. Amid all the disruption, the amount that most people know about the public sphere and the broader world has not yet been disrupted.

And laying my cards and interests on the table: That’s a big piece of what we’re trying to do at Upworthy — storytelling that gets millions of people thinking about the fast food economy or the effects of climate change on Syria.

The word “average” is key. From a citizenship standpoint, it’s important: You need 50% + 1 vote to win. But under the surface of that average, there are immense changes. Hobbyists and politicos and media thinkers all know far more about their respective fields than they ever did before — just not, on average, more about each others’.

This is one of the key questions the platforms need to form an opinion about: Does that matter?

When platforms eat media, what’s left?

Someone working at one of the Big Social Media companies once told me: “What does media do? It finds facts. It packages them into stories. It distributes them. And it monetizes them. We’ll take the finding, the distribution, and the monetization. You can take the storytelling.”

Facts are fast becoming commodities. There’s an infinite supply of dots, but connecting them into coherency and relevance and emotional salience remains a human-powered task.

Herrman talks about two purposes of news media: “the bringing to light of stubborn new facts” and the “discovery of countervailing narratives.” I’m convinced that platforms will take a big chunk of the former. But the latter — the sticking of facts together into something compelling and understandable and important — remains a craft best suited to real, live people, including a bunch of them who are skilled at what we now call investigative journalism.

Where’s the Lippman of Snapchat?

Being in the middle of all this change is thrilling, though whether it’s thrilling like a hurricane or the Renaissance or a world war is a little unclear. World historical forces and powers are clashing and being reconfigured. We don’t really know yet what the collateral damage is or will be.

But the fundamental oddness of the moment is this: On one “side,” you have Old Media with all of its century of political philosophy geared up for a fight. And on the other … what? Most of the new platforms don’t really have a declared democratic philosophy.

Arguably, PageRank embodies within it a theory of how democracy should work — but it’s been a long time since PageRank (or Google Search) has been the primary drive. And beyond vague statements about connecting the world, the new platforms have been relatively quiet about where their democratic responsibilities lie.

A conversation about that would be a good start.