Megaphone

A megaphone is amplification without any implied authority, which is the reason the framework needs a separate word for it. In a concentric circle amplification increases towards the centre and confers no control over anyone's actions, so reach and command are separate quantities and a megaphone measures only the first. What makes the term worth defining is that reach in practice is rarely distributed by merit and can be held by someone whose expertise does not match it, which is the demagogue problem knowledge bridges exist to close. Marsh wrote about holding one directly, describing the massive megaphone she had in those years as a platform and an opportunity to amplify people fighting for human rights at a pivotal moment. The practical technique she describes is the interesting part, since she used endo-ideal figureheads and avatars in the movements she helped create so that people would hear an endo-ideal's voice and see an endo-ideal's image when they read her work, which was what convinced serious journalists to cover the material. That is a deliberate use of the endogroup machinery against itself, borrowing the amplification that attaches to a centre in order to carry something the centre would not have carried. She also records the cost of the arrangement, since by March 2012 the political and ethical differences between her and the organization outweighed the advantages of retaining an extremely influential megaphone, which is the ordinary price of borrowing a platform rather than holding one.

Media studies has a long literature on gatekeeping and on who gets access to mass audiences, and platform studies examines how algorithmic distribution now performs the same function. The attention economy frames reach as the scarce resource. Marsh's usage is closest to the ordinary metaphorical one and gains its precision from the surrounding framework, since defining amplification as separable from authority is what lets her propose a governance design in which experts are heard loudly and command nothing, and what lets her identify the demagogue as someone occupying reach without being the source of the expertise it carries.