Jonathan Rauch: “Our conversations are mediated through institutions like journals and newspapers and social-media platforms. They rely on a dense network of norms and rules, like truthfulness and fact-checking. They depend on the expertise of professionals, like peer reviewers and editors. The entire system rests on a foundation of values: a shared understanding that there are right and wrong ways to make knowledge. Those values and rules and institutions do for knowledge what the U.S. Constitution does for politics: They create a governing structure, forcing social contestation onto peaceful and productive pathways. And so I call them, collectively, the Constitution of Knowledge. If we want to defend that system from its many persistent attackers, we need to understand it—and its very special notion of reality.”
As lockdowns lift, media firms brace for an “attention recession”: from The Economist. “People have spent a year glued to screens, but now the attention boom is turning to bust.”
Thomas Ariyh: “Which review you should show first? “Sales were up to 84% higher on a UK retailer’s website when the first review showed had five stars (vs one star), independent of the product’s average rating.”
