Social media shifts authority and influence from traditional mainstream voices (e.g., institutional chiefs, professionals, pundits, critics, fashion editors, and other tastemakers) to respected online voices, and eventually to people conversing and sharing their opinions with one another. The availability, transparency, and accessibility of knowledge gained online has broken, in Harold Innis’s apt phrase, ”the monopolies of knowledge” enjoyed and controlled by companies, institutions, governments, and elites. This transfer is not new or unique to social media; it occurs whenever new communications technologies take hold. Innis himself researched these changes in his book Empire and Communications, which began by exploring the impacts of moving from stone tablets to adopting papyrus in … Continue reading Stephen D.Rappaport