Visions Unite

The way mass communication works now is broken. What information is spread, and to whom, is not serving the greater good.

To fix it, we need to change both who decides what is disseminated, and how they go about deciding it.

The gatekeepers of the establishment mass media serve at the pleasure of, and ultimately stay within parameters acceptable to, the owners.

Social media network operators likewise answer to their ownership elite, but gatekeeping is less centralized on social media. A shared knowledge of news may therefore be more elusive on the level of a society or even community. As anywhere, advertisers, paid propagandists, paid trolls, and bots aren't typically constructive additions to the public conversation. At best, they represent narrow interests that are likely already overrepresented. But a person's friends and family are probably not chosen for their ability to provide a wide array of well-curated news sources, either, nor are other accounts someone seeks out on social media often meant for this purpose.

Yet these connections on social media—in this stirred up mix with proprietary algorithms, bots, and advertisers—are how many of us get most of our news today, to the extent that we get much news at all.

To solve this problem, we cannot pretend everything was fine when we got our news from a different handful of corporations owned by wealthy capitalists. People have been trying to solve the problem of getting accurate information to the majority of humanity for a long time; to take one critique of the mass media from a century ago, Upton Sinclair published The Brass Check in 1919.

Indeed, most of the rest of our news is still coming from corporate or government mass media, and that isn't anywhere near good enough either.

Community-moderated mass communication works differently.

First, in who makes dissemination decisions: Everybody.

Second, in how the decisions are made: By a small number of people, serving as representatives of everybody, drawn by random lot, for one decision at a time.

Just as the same two people sitting down at the same game board make very different decisions when playing chess instead of checkers, so the same dozen people presented with the same news make very different decisions about what to share when representing their community instead of trying to entertain some acquaintances without offending a relative or boss.

How would someone feel they are representing their community? There's a Catch-22 there, for sure. Many people do not feel themselves to be part of a community. A necessary bedrock of community is some amount of shared experiences, information, understanding.

That's what community-moderated mass communication provides: a base level of shared experiences, information, and understanding. Being incorporated into a democratic communication system, first as recipient and then as participant, helps make a community of individuals.

Why would people participate?

As Robert McChesney and John Nichols have put it for years, if you care about any issue, you need to care about the media.

In a forum of hundreds or thousands, you can make the case that a handful or even scores of moderators drawn from the community make the forum "community-moderated". At scale the distinction between community-originated and other gatekeepers breaks down— either way, it's a tiny elite shaping the communication of a much larger number. Sortition is the way to keep a community, even a very large one, in control of its own communication.