Media has an important function for society, that of creating an "agora", a place where society comes together. In essence, it is an information processing syst

Media has an important function for society, that of creating an "agora", a place where society comes together. In essence, it is an information processing system - given that we surpassed the range of 400-or-so people societies where everybody knows everybody else, how can the individual get enough information so that she can function to serve the society? In the case of western societies this means for example being able to vote, or get voted for. An ill-informed, egotistical individual might become a danger for society as a whole, like we are seeing in current US politics and the discussion about the "post factual" society. The term itself hints towards a failure of the media system. And to that end, the filter bubbles of social networkd have a huge responsibility in it. Being informed means that one has to be confronted with inconvenient truths and become part of the quest to resolve them through argument and reason. Given that we now have unprecedented means to filter out diverging opinions, we as technologists have a new responsibility for this that we are not living up to. It might have to take a catastrophe first to hand off the power of making decisions here - eg new policies - that force social media companies to optimize for other metrics than just "engagement" to live up to this responsibility. Chanced are the catastrophe is just unfolding in front of our eyes.