In a sentence, Matt Ridley argues vigorously and convincingly that the 'Eureka!' folk myths of innovation are, in fact, impossible attribution problems and are better thought of as incremental, iterative processes. When we think of the car, we tend to think of Henry Ford, the Wright brothers synonymous with flight, Edison with the lightbulb. Starting with energy, Ridley argues that each innovations' provenance is far more distributed than folk consciousness would have us believe. Some other common themes to Ridley are the decentralized nature of progress and economics a la Friedman, echoing The Rational Optimist.
Guglielmo Marconi, a fascist and recipient of more than one honor by Il Duce, was born in Bologna, Italy in 1874. In the 1890s following the work of Heinrich Hertz, James Clerk Maxwell, and others, Marconi started to develop what he called "wireless telegraphy", a mechanism for transmitting information without the help of wired electricity. Perhaps owing to his affinity toward fascist dictators and demagogues, among the early adopters of the technology were Joseph Goebbels and Benito Mussolini -- FDR also embraced the radio, using it to sell policy to the American public. Aside from a few modern rabble-rousers -- Glenn Beck, Alex Jones and earlier soapbox squawks like Father Charles Coughlin -- radio is a pretty benign medium. I fail to imagine anything less likely to offend than Elvin Duran or Delilah. But while discussing the development of the radio, Matt Ridley makes a passing reference to its similaries to social media, more recently, and there are more than enough similarities worth noticing.
SixDegrees launched in 1997. But it was ten years later when social media platforms moved beyond within-network communication and sharing to a medium open to advertisers and the world in 2006 with the launch of Facebook news feed, then ads -- and almost over night, social media became the internet's 38th parallel. To call social media feeds a polarizing battleground for ideas would be giving too much credit to the steady dribble of discharge. To use the example of Elon Musk's Twitter transformation almost seems unfair, but it's hardly an island. I reactivated an old Facebook account to read local Facebook group activity during a short period where the Board of Education was arguing for and against the passage of Policy 5756 which outlines policy regarding transgender students. If there was any reasonable debate, it was depressingly smothered under the noise. But while social media seems to be, in turns, a perspective confirming filter bubble and a snake pit, are we in social media's worst moment? Or does it get better?
If radio is a good model, there are a few reasons that we might believe social media would become more benign in the not-too-distant future. To start, historical precent might seem to confirm this. Radio eventually evolved from a heavily propagandized medium into a more diverse, entertainment-driven platform. People are more likely to listen to top-100 stations in their car than they are to talk radio, NPR and premium talk radio stations maybe being an exception. People might also be more media literate, better at identifying misinformation -- why this would be true of radio and not social media, I have no idea. Radio is also surrounded by a stronger regulatory framework -- and this has been a constant battle between social media platforms and regulators. It's a case where platforms have rejected responsibility for content hosted on their sites, arguing that they only provide a service allowing users to connect and, once in a while, publish content. Finally, the market matures over time and the focus shifts. This can have a positive effect, reducing inflammatory content over time.
On the other hand, social media seems like a different animal. Radio is a blunt instrument. Receivers' ears perk up, picking up airborne electromagnetic signals which are transduced back into audible frequencies. Social media is more direct. Radio is a one-way medium. Social media is driven by engagement -- clicks, likes, hovers feed algorithmic amplification. It is also capable of micro-targeting. Targeting a specific list of users, a zip code, or interest group is easy to do. And more broadly, similar to user engagement, network effects create wider reaching information cascades than radio or traditional media could ever achieve. Virality in the context of media is a very modern phenomenon for which we mostly have social media to credit. Radio, like social media now, is driven by advertising. But again, the difference is that social media has a means by which to influence ad revenue generation positively in engagement: that's to say, its economic model is more directly driven by user engagement.
So there might be reasons to be hopeful. But social media's many-to-many nature, in contrast to radio being many-to-one, probably makes social media, if not immune, at least more resistant to a benign future. This is my and not Ridley's conclusion. He testifies to using social media daily and seems to see it as a generally positive cultural phenomenon. I might be short-sighted or he might be too captivated by the book's thesis. But I'm being picky, because this book is a wonderful and well argued case for the power of free thought and experiment to drive progress and human well being.
Social media's timeline:
1988: IRC
1994: GeoCities
1997: SixDegrees
2003: Friendster, Myspace
2004: Facebook, Hi5
2005: YouTube
2006: Twitter and Facebook news feed; Facebook launches the first social media ads platform