What AI means for the business of: journalism

[Tony Haile at Filament]

Earlier this week I keynoted FediForum and also used the metaphor of trusted archipelagos — it’s really interesting to see the way Tony Haile’s used them here. I strongly agree with his conclusions, and I think everyone in media needs to pay attention to this argument.

There’s a difference between social media and social networks. Social media is the wide-open town square that we’ve heard so much about; social networks are communities of interest, practice, or shared values.

Social media has been declining, and, as Tony says:

“In its place, the real conversations and connections migrated to an archipelago of WhatsApp groups, Slacks, Discord servers and Signal chats. This is the Archipelago of Trust: self-selecting focused communities loosely bridged by mutual members and bounded by common norms.”

This hasn’t been well-represented in the features of new tools. (I’m very interested to see what Tony’s up to with Filament.) My argument earlier this week was partially that people building new open social web tools should look to existing communities to model how they evolve their features and protocols.

The thing that I don’t think we’ve solved for yet are that these trusted archipelagos are necessarily exclusive. What social media was brilliant at was letting someone with no connections from anywhere in the world participate based on the strength of their ideas. In a world where you have to know someone to be let in, the bar to participation is higher for someone who isn’t already part of the in-crowd. That has the potential to make homogenous groups; if we’re not really careful, we’ll repeat or even amplify existing social biases.

Still, it’s very clear that community organizers — or, to reframe a little, community facilitators — are loci of trust that it would be wise to build around. People trust people far more than they trust brands, platforms, or technology.

[Link]