# notes --- - the problem is not how social media shapes individual knowledge, but how it shapes our collective knowledge about ourselves as a whole - technology shapes what we think and how we behave - democracy is a collective enterprise - and it doesn’t work if everyone’s too angry to compromise ([[Weirder Oxygen and Weirder Amplification]]) # highlights --- >The fundamental problem, as I see it, is not that social media *misinforms individuals* about what is true or untrue but that it creates *publics with malformed collective understandings*. >we tend to think about democracy as a phenomenon that depends on the knowledge and capacities of individual citizens, even though, like markets and bureaucracies, it is a profoundly collective enterprise. That in turn leads us to focus on how social media shapes individual knowledge, for better or worse, and to mistake symptoms for causes. >individual citizens are biased and, on average, not particularly knowledgeable about politics. This mismatch between rhetoric and reality has created opportunities for a minor academic industry of libertarians and conservatives arguing that democracy is unworkable and that we should rely instead on well informed elites to rule. The problem with this elitist case against democracy is that elites are just as biased, and furthermore are liable to use their greater knowledge to bolster their biases rather than correct them >Making individuals better at thinking and seeing the blind spots in their own individual reasoning will only go so far. What we need are better *collective* means of thinking. >the public is the aggregated beliefs and wants of the citizenry as a whole. >The problem is that we have no way to *directly see* what all the citizens want and believe, or to make full sense of it. So instead we rely on a variety of representative technologies to make the public visible, in more or less imperfect ways. >all these systems are not just passive measures of public opinion but active forces that rework it. >a “[reflective belief](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27009),” and some of the qualities of a shibboleth - something that you know you are supposed to believe, and publicly affirm that you believe but might or might not subscribe to personally.\* >In short, the technologies through which we see the public shape what we think the public is. And that, in turn, shapes how we behave politically and how we orient ourselves. >Many of the problems that we are going to face over the next many years will stem from publics that have been deranged and distorted by social media > they look through a distorting technological lens on an imaginary sexual public to understand what is normal and expected, and what is not. This then shapes their interactions with others. >The more important change is to our beliefs about *what other people think,* which we perpetually update based on social observation. When what we observe is filtered through social media, our understandings of the coalitions we belong to, and the coalitions we oppose, what we have in common, and what we disagree on, shift too. >People’s sense of the contours of politics - what is legitimate and what is out of bounds; what others think and are likely to do and how they ought respond - is visibly changing around us. >Can democracy work, if a couple of highly atypical men exercise effective control over large swathes of the public space?