The modern world rests on confidence. Each of us expects that others will act in ways that keep us safe and allow us to prosper. Our society is organised around a social contract, the arrangement Hobbes described, in which individuals surrender part of their free will to the state in exchange for an escape from the state of nature. In societies like ours that contract has since become something looser: the trust we extend to each other so that we can pursue objectives none of us reaches alone.

The clearest everyday expression of that confidence is money. A banknote has no worth of its own; it holds value only because we have collectively agreed to keep treating it as though it does.

Confidence is not fixed. It erodes when an individual or an institution is seen to fail, and the more serious the failure, the more leverage is lost along with the trust. Once it breaks, it rarely recovers in full. Such shifts have always been part of public life, but the internet, and now artificial intelligence, have added a new kind: confidence that moves because a third party moved it, or for reasons no one can quite explain.

These new shifts are driven above all by what José van Dijck and Thomas Poell call new media logic.

Media let us see how a perception of reality is built for an audience. That reality may be subjective, constructed or, on rare occasions, objective. Which of the three it turns out to be depends on the audience's media environment, and on the bias that environment carries.

Because media are where people form their view of the world, they will also give us the data to estimate, through the LPMM, how much confidence an audience places in a given actor. If we can estimate the reach of each outlet and then extract the narrative and the rhetoric of what it publishes, we can measure how a story travels and how it changes on the way. Turning qualitative material into quantities is the foundation of the LPMM: each item is coded into categories such as narrative, theme, rhetoric, who is speaking and who is being addressed. From there we will be able to read how an audience perceives an actor, and where that perception can be improved.

Media are also a key confidence marker because they are the bridge between citizens and the institutions and businesses around them. Agenda-setting theory, developed by Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw in 1972, explains why: media decide which events to cover, and the events they cover become the concerns of the wider public, the public to whom politicians are accountable in a democracy. So when media turn from event B to event A, the population wants to know what is happening with event A, and politicians, who need the approval and support of their electorate, deal with A first.

We are built for institutions, companies and individuals (as long as they hold to ethical values) who need to sustain a high standard of public perception in order to stay competitive. What our clients will have in common is a position of leadership. Each will have a media audience, or the prospect of one, which makes them a voice of some weight in their market. In one of his last books, Leadership, Six Studies in World Strategy, Henry Kissinger examines what that position demands.

Any society, whatever its political system, is perpetually in transit between a past that forms its memory and a vision of the future that inspires evolution. ... Leaders think and act at the intersection of two axes: the first, between the past and the future; the second, between the abiding values and aspirations of those they lead. Their first challenge is analysis, which begins with a realistic assessment of their society...

Henry Kissinger, Leadership, Six Studies in World Strategy

That is exactly the ground we work on: the realistic assessment of a society and of a market. The world is increasingly polarised, crowded with competing narratives and competing versions of reality. Through the LPMM we will help leaders move along both of Kissinger's axes: between the past and the future, and between the abiding values of their audience and its aspirations. The first shapes who they are in their media environment. The second shapes who they need to be.

That narrow line, between confidence that never stops shifting and what leadership demands, is where we have to operate.

We imagine this as the Large Public Media Map (LPMM). Published media on a given issue are screened and collected, then assembled into a single map of that media environment. A set of tools will decode that map into something readable, so that clients can follow how confidence moves in their market, and adapt to it.