This post explores how the Revolution Social podcast, hosted by Evan Henshaw-Plath, reveals the transformation of media in the age of social networks and open protocols. It argues that social media has surpassed traditional models of broadcasting, publishing, and rights management, demanding new civic frameworks for communication, ownership, and accountability. Drawing on Decentered Media’s principles of participation, deliberation, and social value, the piece calls for a shift from legacy media paradigms to distributed, relationship-based systems of communication that recognise interaction and co-creation as the foundation of modern public life.
Listening to Revolution Social has been a reminder of how rapidly our understanding of communication systems is being overtaken by the pace of technological change. What began as an exploration of how social media emerged has become a conversation about what kind of media ecology we now inhabit, and how far it has outgrown the frameworks inherited from twentieth-century broadcasting, publishing, and rights management.
Evan Henshaw-Plath, known as Rabble, approaches these discussions with the insight of someone who was present at the birth of social networking as we know it. The series moves from the early history of Twitter to the decentralised possibilities of new social protocols, connecting the personal stories of technologists, writers, and organisers who are grappling with the consequences of their own innovations. What becomes clear through these exchanges is that social media has long since ceased to be a subset of media. It is a new communicative form altogether—networked, participatory, and continually reconstituting itself through use.
The guests—ranging from Jack Dorsey and Kara Swisher to David Bollier, Taylor Lorenz, and Mike Masnick—illustrate a shared realisation: that the systems of ownership, authorship, and control which governed the previous century’s media institutions no longer hold. Their replacement is not simply a technical upgrade but a transformation in the way communication itself is organised. The idea of a “platform” or “protocol” is more than a software distinction; it is a philosophical shift from centralised publishing to distributed association. As these conversations show, this is not a clean transition. It is messy, contradictory, and often politically charged, but it also opens a space to imagine what a civic digital public sphere might look like if it were designed around participation rather than extraction.
From a Decentered Media perspective, what stands out is the alignment between this emerging discourse and the principles of civic communication. The Revolution Social episodes demonstrate that communication technologies are not neutral tools. They shape the conditions under which social meaning is made and remade. The question, then, is not how to regulate them within the limits of legacy models, but how to create new paradigms of accountability and trust that reflect the realities of distributed communication. These systems are no longer about transmission and reception; they are about interaction and co-creation. They blur the boundaries between producer and audience, between public and private, between information and identity.
As Rabble and his guests discuss, this shift also exposes the inadequacy of traditional rights management systems. Copyright, licensing, and data protection were conceived for a world of scarcity, in which content was discrete and ownership could be clearly assigned. The social media environment operates through abundance, remix, and recombination. What is shared, reshaped, or repurposed is not easily contained within legal categories designed for print or broadcast. The result is a cultural and ethical challenge: how do we sustain creativity, fairness, and public accountability when the mechanisms of distribution no longer pass through institutional gates?
The need now is for a conversation that moves beyond nostalgia for the certainties of old media. Rather than trying to retrofit twentieth-century frameworks onto twenty-first-century networks, we should be developing a civic model of communication that recognises the social value of participation. The discussions in Revolution Social suggest that this is possible—through open protocols, commons-based governance, and a renewed commitment to communication as a social practice rather than a market commodity.
If legacy media taught us to think of communication as a product, then social media demands that we understand it as a relationship. It is time for new paradigms that reflect that reality: participatory rather than proprietary, distributed rather than centralised, and grounded in the ethics of shared understanding rather than the economics of attention. The revolution in social communication is already underway; our task is to develop the civic imagination to meet it.