Published on November 20, 2025 10:34 PM GMT

Maybe a definition would help…

What is “mass communication”? What is a “mass communication system”?

One definition for mass communication could be “any time information becomes synchronized between people who do not share a social circle” where a social circle is the set of people talked to on a regular basis. Probably in person.

The “mass communication system” then is the communication tools and conventions that allow that information synchronization to take place. This would include high tech things like social media, low tech things like gossip networks and institutionalized things like school systems.

Examples are often good

I’ll walk through some examples of things I’m thinking of as mass communication systems. I’m mostly interested in social media platforms, but other mass communication systems are very important, and I think social media platforms play a large supplemental role to them. In both very good and very bad possible futures, social media would come to replace them altogether. So what are these other systems I’m thinking of?

I’ll hereafter refer to “mass communication systems” as MCSs for brevity.^[1]

Political systems

Political systems are probably the most important example of an MCS. From an idealized perspective the purpose of a political system is to gain an understanding of the desires of a polity’s citizens, integrate the diversity of desires into a coherent plan, and coordinate the execution of that plan by issuing actionable information to the relevant parties.

I hope you will notice that this indeed fits the model of a MCS. Information is synchronized both in the attempt to gain insight to the desires of disparate citizens and in the issuing relevant information for action. The middle step is a bit mysterious, but presumably involves mass communication itself since governments are made up of too many people to fit in a single social circle.

Interconnected open circles and pop culture

To go to a much looser concept, any time people are talking about other people with whom they don’t regularly interact, that must be part of some MCS. I think the conventions surrounding different kinds of gossip represent a family of similar kinds of MCSs, which are similar to, or the same as, those for sharing memetics and pop culture.

Subcultures and identity politics are an interesting detail here. By assigning abstract labels^[2] to oneself and others, one is able to locate oneself in larger discussions. These discussions which people engage in, with the awareness they are going on within and between many social circles simultaneously, could be referred to as “mass conversations”. When meeting a stranger one can predict what part of ongoing mass conversations would be worth focusing on with them, by inferring what groups they identify with.^[3]

School systems

School systems attempt to teach to every person what we think every person should know. Obviously this has its flaws and historic tragedies, but it still feels like an enormous and inspirational endeavour. As with governments there is a dynamic of trying to gather, cohere, and distribute information.

Schools, along with mass media and pop culture, form the shared common context of overlapping worldviews that makes mass conversations possible. Mass media itself is a MCS or set of interrelated MCSs. I think this common context is incredibly valuable and should be something we are actively trying to foster and protect.

Academia and R&D

Academia and R&D are the natural extension of school. When one learns their way to the edge of human knowledge then they may begin to extend human knowledge. But anyone at all involved with academia or R&D knows that they are systems with their own peculiarities, making them MCSs worth considering in their own right.

Literally all other social organization systems

Some kinds of organizations I haven’t already mentioned that fit the patterns of the above examples are for-profit companies and corporations, non-profits, militaries, and generally all social organizations that span more than a single social circle.

Bulletin boards of all kinds are MCSs which enable connections to be made between unrelated people on the basis of things posted to the board.

Religion is both an example of an identifier for taking part in mass conversations and a MCS itself.

Money and the financial world are a MCS that could be seen as a system for communicating who has accumulated what amount of social worth through their work or how resources should be managed and distributed, but of course it seems to have taken on a life of its own that is not entirely captured by such a description. Alas.

How did these things get here?

I think many people take all of these systems for granted. Social realities beyond mortal influence. But none of these things existed beyond the dawn of time. All were created at some point in time through some process. I think the ways that MCSs are created can be described with 3 classifications, though most are probably some combination of all three.

The 3 processes of MCS creation are:

• Emergence: Some capability is unlocked that allows communication at some larger level. For example, when people started trading tokens for goods and services, that created a context where massive trading routes could emerge.
• Evolution: The exact details of how a given MCS works could be selected for through evolutionary pressure. Maybe one way of doing trade or exchanging gossip doesn’t work as well as another, and so people adopt the better system and the worse one fades into obscurity. Then, slight mutations in the established way of doing things may be selected for or against, leading to further evolution and refinement.
• Engineering: I think this is the least common^[4]. Only quite recently in human history have we been trying to create new and better MCSs. I don’t really mean things like radio or the internet. Although they do count as MCSs, they are more basic than what I really want to focus on. They are more like capabilities that allow the emergence of MCSs that work through them than MCSs on their own. But things like planned economies and governments and campaigns to create new ways of communicating and coordinating are humans trying to engineer MCSs. Social media is probably a place more than any other where successful MCS engineering has taken place.

Do these things even matter?

I think there is great potential and great danger in MCSs of all types, but in my vision of a good future, we will need to eventually have much better understanding of our MCSs, to the point that we can make engineered changes to them. Prudently, we should do so with an awareness that ill conceived engineering of MCSs in the past has caused great humanitarian tragedies, but so has emergence and evolution of MCSs which we have had little control over and very little understanding of.

So it seems MCSs are very important things for us to understand clearly. Their importance, and the importance of understanding them, might seem obvious to you, or you may think it is too meta and a waste of time. In either case, I’d like to explore a bit of why I think MCSs are worthy of focus.

It’s all coordination.

It seems there are two purposes of MCSs. When people want different contradicting things for the world, they need to negotiate with one another (or fight, but that’s outside of my current focus). When people want similar things for the world they need to coordinate. So the two purposes of MCSs are negotiation and coordination.

Since everyone learns language and how to engage with MCSs in their own context, it isn’t initially clear how much any two people need to negotiate vs coordinate. They need to first understand one another well enough to know whether they even want similar or different things. This initial attempt to understand is a form of coordination. It is my sense that this is a key step that often fails, but that is a topic for later.

Related things that MCSs are used for which I think can be contextualized as negotiation and coordination include developing new knowledge and terminology, exploring the space of possibilities, debate and coming to agreements about ideas, education and knowledge sharing, reporting, entertainment, and probably many other overlapping kinds of contexts.

This covers basically all of human activity in one way or another, so yeah, making sure it works well is probably pretty important based just on that, but lets move on to something more specific that people get more impassioned about…

Is social media helping or harming democracy?

Social media is having very significant effects on democracy, but disconcertingly, it isn’t clear if they for the better or worse.

Some possible benefits to democracy:

• Social media gives citizens a platform to easily voice their thoughts and opinions for consideration by other citizens and politicians.
• Social media allows people to connect to one another to create communities around shared interests. This strengthens those communities ability to lobby for their interests.
• Social media provides a channel for track II diplomacy.

Some possible detriments to democracy:

• Social media provides an unprecedented opportunity for propaganda.
• Social media spreads viral memes that play on peoples anger and fear, worsening social divides and harming peoples ability to understand one another.
• Social media enables witch hunts and citizen justice through mass harassment campaigns.

I note that the benefit of giving people a platform is at odds with the detriment of spreading viral memes. I don’t know if this is intrinsic to providing a platform or if these are separate but closely related dynamics. If you have thoughts, please share.

Dreaming beyond democracy.

It isn’t super important to my MCS discussion, but I prefer the idea of consensus over democracy. Democracy is a hack we use because we don’t have effective enough communication and coordination to do something better.

It would be wildly impractical to get everyone in a country to talk to everyone else directly in order to determine who’s doing what and how it affects them and what everyone wants, so instead we choose people to represent other people in discussions that are meant to represent the will of everyone, but compressing millions or billions of people’s wills into the will of a minority of representatives is a necessarily lossy process. Wouldn’t it be better to have something higher bandwidth than this kind of representation?

To be explicit. Systems, not people, already rule us, and we should be glad, because people are small and cannot pay attention to all the things that a ruling system must pay attention to. But we should want our systems to be better than they are.

Social media is getting closer to that ideal of having everyone talk to everyone, but it’s still too messy and inefficient and introduces its own new problems.

Still, I don’t like to think of democracy as an end goal. Adding social media to existing democracy changes it. Maybe for the better. Maybe for the worse. The fact that I don’t know which seems like a pretty significant problem.

If we are attempting to modify and improve our systems, I think we need to be careful to avoid losing the value that has been gained through democracy, but our goal should be systems that serve people better than democracy allows. I want better understanding and coordination than what our current systems achieve.

In the next post I want to start talking about the classes of problems I see as affecting mass communication, and focus on the class of problem I hope can be alleviated by the creation of better social media platforms or the improvement of existing social media platforms.

If you made it this far. Thank you for reading! I’d also be grateful for further engagement:

• If you saw a description and think it would be better to use other terms, please leave a link to them.
• If you saw any claims you think are unjustified or wrong, please flag them, either by highlighting and clicking emoji to leave a checkmark, x-mark, or confidence percent, or by leaving a comment quoting the relevant text.
• If you have citations to support or oppose any claim, please link them.

Appendix: Are mass communication systems OISs?

If you have interacted with me and my ideas before you may be wondering about the relationship between MCSs and Outcome Influencing Systems (OISs). Are they the same thing? How are they different?

(A very brief description of OISs for those who don’t know: An OIS is anything that has the capability to influence outcomes to accord with its preferences. OISs are not distinct, rather there is often overlap, and many OISs are composed of other OISs. The preferences of an OIS are not necessarily related to the preferences of any other OIS ttroublinglyhat it is composed of or overlapping with.)

The most significant distinction is probably that MCSs seem more like substrates that OISs may be hosted on. Sometimes there may be a single obvious OIS for a MCS, such as when referring to a single government. Other times, such as in the case of social media, many OISs may be hosted, either fully, or partially, by a single MCS.

The details and dynamics of a given MCS may make it easier or harder for certain kinds of OISs to use it as a host. This may be an effect we want to use if we are learning to engineer MCSs or OISs. For example, there may be certain kinds of memes we want to select for and others we wish to select against.

(This is, of course, somewhat obvious, and is the reason so many people are so interested in influencing social media platforms, however, I feel it right now exists as an open secret, but not something we are actually competent at talking about. I think the dynamics of MCSs are the sort of thing that peer reviewed journals should be reporting on.^[5] It’s really important that we understand and can talk about what’s going on with these things.)

Also, when the dynamics of a MCS is having an influence on the OISs it hosts, this means it is having an influence on the influences of those OISs. If the intensity of this influence is significant, it makes sense to start thinking of that MCS as being an OIS itself, with its own preferences.

So a MCS may be an OIS if it is a single OIS or if it exerts influence on the OISs it hosts, but otherwise is better seen as a tool or substrate.

1. Oh no… I’m creating more new acronyms. This might be a bad sign. It just makes it so much easier to talk about things though.

2. By this I mostly mean words for kinds of people, but styles, behaviours, and other details of a person may identify them in this way even if there isn’t a single specific word for the kind of person. But any time a kind of person becomes noteworthy, words will eventually be created to describe them.

3. If done well, this can lead to vibing or at least productive dialog. If done poorly it can lead to offence and embarrassment. Labeller beware!

4. Paradoxically, when people think of MCSs, I think they most commonly either think of them as tacit parts of reality that exist without justification, or they think of them as things that were engineered. As if we could really engineer something as complicated as a government.

5. ^{^}

   I don’t think they really are, are they? I don’t read that much sociology and don’t have a good sense of how much overlap there is between computer science and sociology, especially in the way I am suggesting, but I know I don’t know enough and want to know more.