The Signal Index
The cross-board reading. Every instrument we run publishes a signature gap between what its conversation narrates and what the data measures. The index puts those gaps side by side and tracks them volume over volume.
Across every conversation we monitor, the narrated reading sits roughly 50 points from the measured one. In the Sudan war conversation, 17.6% of violence names civilians as its target while 70.7% lands on them. In the Texas healthcare conversation, the system narrates itself at 5.4% negative while patients run 53%. Two unrelated domains, one structure: the feed understates the harm.
Each instrument reads its conversation along two dimensions and publishes the distance between them. Sudan Watch measures the Framing Gap: violence as narrated against violence as landed, 17.6% versus 70.7%, a 53.1-point gap with 84.3% of civilian-directed violence never naming civilians at all. TX Health Monitor measures the Voice Gap: the system’s self-narration against patient experience, 5.4% versus 53% negative, a 47.6-point gap that widened 10.4 points across the quarter. The domains share nothing except the structure of the distortion.
Both gaps come from who gets to narrate. War reporting names belligerents, so victims become subordinate clauses. Health systems publish their own good news, so patients become a separate, quieter channel. In each case the loudest reading is produced by the actors with the megaphone, and the measured reading has to be reconstructed from context. That is what the index tracks edition over edition: whether the distance between megaphone and measurement is closing or growing.
Sudan enters the next window with its conflict tone escalating; Texas enters with its Voice Gap widening 10.4 points per quarter. Both signature gaps are computed identically in every future edition, so Vol. 02 becomes a trend line rather than a snapshot. New instruments join the index the day their first edition publishes.
- 01Every figure in the index comes from the same frozen editions it links to; nothing is recomputed for the comparison. Each edition reads its conversation along two designed dimensions and publishes the distance between them as its signature gap.
- 02Gaps are comparable because they share a unit: percentage points between the narrated reading and the measured reading of the same feed, over the same window.
- 03The index mean is the simple average of the signature gaps. It is a barometer of how far monitored discourse sits from measured reality, not a ranking of the domains.
- 04Each volume recomputes the same gaps over the next window, so the index becomes a trend line. Instruments join the index when their first edition publishes.
Social Knowing, "The Signal Index" (Vol. 01), 2026. https://socialknowing.com/the-signal-index
Every index figure traces back to a dated, citable edition.