Enterprise AI Analysis

In the most common sense of the verb, ‘to amplify’ is to boost an audio signal with the effect of increasing volume. Amplification is often achieved with the aid of an electronic device: an amplifier, combined with a speaker. An amplifier receives an audio signal from an input source: a record playing on a turntable, someone playing guitar, a person speaking into a microphone, etc. It then creates a larger audio signal which is sent to the speaker, creating a louder sound. How much of a difference amplification makes can be measured by comparing the size of the input signal to the size of the output signal. This is called the gain. Generally, we want an amplifier not only to boost the input signal but also to reproduce it with fidelity. If the amplifier fails to faithfully reproduce the input signal it becomes distorted. Beyond this, amplifiers can also suffer from the problem of feedback.

In the political sense, the amplifier is not an electronic device but rather an agent, usually a person, though it may also be a collective agent such as an organization. The agent takes the message of another agent as an input and reproduces the message as an output, with the aim of more people hearing it as a result. In the online case, the agent is a node in a network represented by an account on, for instance, Facebook or Twitter or Bluesky. The size of the input signal is a matter of how widely disseminated the input is prior to amplification, and the size of the output signal is a matter of how widely it is disseminated after amplification has taken place. Analogous to the common understanding of amplification, the difference an agent's amplification makes can be measured by comparing the size of the input signal to the output signal. We can retain gain as the label for this measure. However, instead of gain being a matter of an increase in acoustic volume that can occur whether or not it reaches more people, the sense of amplification we're interested in takes gain as a measurement of how many more people the message reaches.

The amplified utterance can take any number of forms. It might be an assertion, an imperative, an invitation, a question, or something else. When A amplifies B's utterance, there will be times when what is significant is only that the content of the utterance is amplified, independently of whether B gets credited as the original author. Call this agent-neutral amplification. But more often it will be important that the utterance is amplified, and B is credited as its author. Call this agent-acknowledged amplification. Often it will be important that the entire content of an utterance is given uptake. Other times it will only be important that part of the utterance, such as a concept, is amplified.

Sound vs. Political Amplification