The internet has accustomed us to thinking that having influence means having an audience. The more people follow you, the more authoritative you seem. This is the audience model: one person at the centre and many people around them listening.

But for those who produce knowledge, it may not be the right model. A knowledgeable person would not necessarily need a hundred thousand people following them. It might be far more useful to know twenty highly knowledgeable people, each in a different field, with some overlap, able to talk to one another when needed.

The audience and the network: two models compared

An audience is built around a centre. A network is built around connections. In an audience, value tends to converge on one person. In a network, value circulates.
Imagine an engineer who knows materials very well. They can launch a channel, publish content, gain fifty thousand followers and gradually become a popular communicator on materials. Or they can build relationships with a chemist, a designer, an economist, a doctor, a patent expert and a philosopher of science.
In the first case, they increase their visibility. In the second, they increase their capacity to understand, to act and to change the world, or at least their own world.
These are two entirely different forms of growth. We know the first well because it is easy to measure and seemingly significant. But the second might tell us much more about the possibility of gaining access to something new and useful.
The ideal network is not homogeneous
And ideally, a network should consist of connections between different people: if everyone reads the same books, moves in the same circles, uses the same tools and shares the same convictions, a hundred people may produce little more than one. A good network, by contrast, contains real differences: different areas of expertise, different languages and, above all, different ways of seeing the same object. In this sense, diversity is a value when it is a diversity of cultures on the same level, but not identical.
Moreover, this kind of collaboration does not necessarily require consensus. Indeed, a network that agrees too readily risks being less useful than a network of independent people. Can you imagine anything better than disagreeing with people who think at a high level?
Then again, before me and better than me, Edwin Hutchins showed how cognition can be distributed among several people and the tools they use, while Pierre Lévy explored the collective intelligence that emerges from connections between individual bodies of knowledge.
The incentives of the audience
The audience mechanism creates other, less useful incentives: when many people watch one person, that person inevitably begins to think about what the audience expects of them as well. They have to publish, be recognisable and maintain a certain continuity. If they have become known for talking about a subject, they have an interest in continuing to talk about it, because changing the subject comes at a cost. Visibility thus tends to reward consistency and repetition. Knowledge should reward the possibility of changing one's mind.
There is another problem, too. In the audience economy, two intelligent people talking about the same subject easily become competitors. They compete for attention, invitations, citations and space. In a network, by contrast, the other person's expertise increases the value of mine. I know something they do not. They know something I do not. By connecting, we can both tackle problems that we could not tackle separately. You could say it is the opposite logic.

Changing the metrics

It is a matter of measuring, if I may coin an expression by borrowing from Andy Clark and David Chalmers and their idea of the extended mind, a kind of extended intellectual capital: what I can think resides not only in my own mind, but also at the intersection with the minds of other people who are equal to me, but not identical.

A minimal bibliography

Clark, A., Chalmers, D. (1998), “The Extended Mind”, Analysis, 58(1), pp. 7–19.
Clark, A. (2008), Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension, Oxford University Press.
Hutchins, E. (1995), Cognition in the Wild, MIT Press.
Lévy, P. (1994), L’intelligence collective. Pour une anthropologie du cyberspace, La Découverte.