Everyone runs a small broadcaster

A grandmother in Ismailia forwards a message to a few hundred people in her contacts most mornings.

Twenty years ago her reach was a kitchen table and a phone call to her sister. Now one tap from her sofa lands in the phones of her children's friends, cousins in the Gulf, the man who sold her the fridge. Some of them pass it on. On a busy morning her opinion travels further than a newspaper column did when she was young.

That is real power, and nobody trained her for it.

Each of us now does a small public job every day: deciding what to believe, what to repeat and what to hand to people who trust us. The job has entry requirements, even if nobody checks them at the door.

They are not exotic. Knowing to ask what a percentage is a percentage of, and how few people were asked. Noticing when a message is built to make you feel hurried rather than informed. Understanding that a thing spreads because it is easy to share, not because it is true, and that a group of friends can talk itself into certainty faster than any one of them would alone.

This is not specialist knowledge. It is plain literacy for a world in which every person runs a small broadcaster from a sofa.

Without it we end up working against the very things we care about, passing on the rumour that hurts the shop we like, or the scheme that empties a cousin's savings.

The encouraging part is that all of it can be learnt, at any age, and then taught on, one forwarded message at a time.