🎤 A Conversation about Digital Public Space
We hosted a roundtable discussion dedicated to concepts of locality, infrastructure, and membership online.
New_ Public teamed up with NYU’s Mona Sloane and Jordan Kraemer to collaborate on a rapid-response ethnographic research project titled Terra Incognita NYC to investigate the city’s new digital public spaces.
To launch the new, 81 page report last week, New_ Public co-hosted a roundtable discussion with New_ Public co-director Eli Pariser, project director Mona Sloane, research lead Jordan Kraemer, Chief Technology Officer of New York City John Paul Farmer, Community Tech NY’s Monique Tate, Nextdoor’s research lead Maryam Mohit, and urban studies scholar Garnette Cadogan.
We wanted to share edited excerpts from the lively and thought provoking insights of our guests and use this week’s newsletter to capture the Q&A portion of the conversation, dedicated to unpacking three themes we found from our Terra Incognita NYC project: Locality, Infrastructure, and Membership. This version has been edited for clarity and brevity:
Locality
Mona: The COVID-19 outbreak moved most of our social interactions on line. People made deeper roots locally connecting to their neighborhoods through physical presence, but also more local social interaction, albeit online. This sense of the digital opens the door to a wider world and yet, the digital was mostly employed to deepen local communities.
Eli: How have digital technologies changed what being local means and what’s the value of localness in a world where we can connect wherever and whenever we want?
Maryam: One way that digital technology has changed what it means to be local is that you can asynchronously participate in events that you wouldn't have otherwise been able to participate in. You can stay in the know about what's going on in your neighborhood without having to show up at the community meeting that is at a certain time and place that you may not be able to get to. In my own neighborhood in San Francisco, we've had a 370% increase in burglary, during the pandemic and one of the neighbors on Nextdoor posted information about how to secure your garage, and how to take security precautions in your house. The neighbors got together on the digital platform to share information and to set up a meeting with our police precinct. Without these digital tools, it's an asynchronous conversation.
Monique: Local is no longer really 100% local. Local is global. A few words I associate with that are empathy and understanding. It really gives us an opportunity to see our neighbors from a global perspective and broaden our engagement, and we can establish personal relationships with other people if we choose to do that, but before we lived in silos: For those of us who have access, and go online to see the world in a whole new perspective, and make new friends and relationships, and take on causes and challenges that we may not have previously engaged. The pandemic unveiled the disparity about Internet access, and about digital literacy. Eighteen million people don't have a broadband connection and don't have smartphones.
John Paul: Social connections matter so much in terms of discoverability online. So often, the online experiences are algorithmically reinforced around your prior experiences, your prior connections, and it makes it hard to discover new experiences. How do we address this not just during the pandemic?
Eli: What does drawing on localness give to a digital space?
Garnette: There is this idea that sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls “third places”. The first place is home, the second place is work, and the third place is exchange. Exchange ideas, build a community, build relationships. They're crucial in building community: barber shops, bars, churches, parks, fast food restaurants. McDonald's is the equivalent of the English pub, meant to serve a public places industry in a low income. People come, sit, build community, exchange ideas. There's this phenomenon called interlocal. People are not so much defined by New York City, and Mexico City, as much as they're defined by a particular neighborhood in Puebla and Sunset Park. They move and transition between both of them. They see themselves as deeply committed to the local, but in two different places. In the richness of these “third spaces”, these interlocal spaces, the sense of locality that existed before entered in a digital era.
Infrastructure
Mona: Infrastructure refers to the very uneven distribution of infrastructure and maintenance across the city, which really came to the fore in the lockdown, which essentially meant that vulnerabilities of technical infrastructure became social vulnerabilities. But it also had a lot to do with practice of maintenance and care.
Eli: How have digital spaces promoted equity? How can they promote equity?
John Paul: Digital industry breaks down into three types. There's physical digital infrastructure. We've got to have conduit and fiber that allows this to take place. We've got the technical digital infrastructure here, whatever the code and the data that allows a platform, online space to exist. There's the social digital infrastructure. People have to know what to do with it. And the mores and rules even the unwritten rules around it. Do people choose not to participate in certain spaces because they don't feel comfortable?
Maryam: That also relates to the different technologies and different platforms that create different areas of equity and inequity? If you have a video-based platform, then you have the question of, do you have a background? If you have a text-based platform, then it's about how are your typing skills? How are your visual skills? How is your facility with the language in which you're typing? I think it really depends on the technology platform, in what ways equity is enhanced or decreased.
Monique: Local infrastructure is super important because we focus on community connection. People talk about how an underground network exists. Think about hip hop. The same thing is happening in technology and with the local community, infrastructure, bringing the local organizations, small gatherings, spaces, or even churches to the forefront of being a center. Whether it's to learn about technology, having access to technology, and even more importantly, access to the Internet. Because of that lack of access, people have been accustomed to pulling up in a car and jumping onto the Internet at the library at the church, because it’s close enough for them to share out.
Garnette: What does the infrastructure of care look like? Think of a group like Moms 4 Housing in Oakland and parallel groups across the nation. They depend on structures of kinship and structures of intimacy. So much about digital life for the people who have these infrastructures of care and mutual aid societies, the agency is in issues related to privacy, and control of information in platforms. That's a different way of thinking about the inequality and what with technology and how it raises important challenges that you have to wrestle with in thinking about infrastructure.
Membership
Mona: Membership refers to implicit and explicit rules about who could come in. It has a lot to do with identity with both individual and group identity. It also served as a platform for constituting a sense of belonging to a particular community or a neighborhood.
Eli: How do we create a non-political space?
Maryam: When people say I don't want to be political, it often means something that I don't agree with. With Nextdoor, we're a place for everyone in the neighborhood. And so by definition, you're going to find people who you don't agree with, even if your neighborhood is really homogeneous. You're going to encounter people who you don't agree with. And this is a big challenge for us. We don't have all the answers. We're not about filter bubbles, and echo chambers, which means that we are about facilitating those kinds of conversations that are uncomfortable. How do people have a conversation and start to engage in something where they don't actually agree? One thing that we did is called a kindness reminder that if our machine learning detects language in a comment or post that is likely to be inflammatory. This simply just reminds people to take a breath.
Eli: When we imagine digital spaces, we imagine them as less power stratified then other kinds of spaces. Looking at membership, power shows up in terms of who can speak and who cannot, and what is okay here and what it's not.
Monique: There's a quote from Bryan Stevenson, who is the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, and he asked “How do we look at our unjust past for a just future?” And you can't, unless you recognize that conversations are going to be hard. Think about your personal conversations in your family and the things that you go through, think about your relationships that are long lasting. They reflect that there is some genuineness in there and people have the ability to say, I'm sorry, I apologize.
What I don't like about the Internet is that people have the ability to hide. They will not approach a conversation from a perspective of healing. They approach it from hatred, of name calling. Because of the algorithms that are set up in the computer intentionally. We are being fed different kinds of information just based on where we go. You are sometimes being fed information that's going to keep you in an incite-full place. I think that we have to be realistic. And if we truly want healing, we can't say that we want to be homogeneous, and only living in a silo and connecting with those that are like us, we have to embrace a much larger perspective.
Audience Quote
Krista Rondeau: It’s interesting to consider whether we agree or not. Sometimes we won’t and that’s OK! I feel the idea of “debate” has taken over “discussion,” and not for the better. Maybe we need to bring back “discussion clubs” instead of debate society.
Learnings for Technologists
As part of our Terra Incognita NYC project, we thought about useful takeaways and learnings for technologist in the field:
Technologists need to ensure that communities receive better maintenance regimes for their technological infrastructure.
Home tech set-ups need to be designed for adaptability and a multitude of social uses.
Technology needs to enable the social practices of people from the bottom up.
There is a need for a more holistic framing of “safety,” one that is community specific.
There is a pressing need to engage more directly and deeply with communities and to recognize their curation and maintenance as labor.
We also address what policymakers, urban designers, and researchers can learn from the Terra Incognita NYC project, and suggest a short list of demands that can be made by community advocates. Download the Terra Incognita NYC report here.
Embracing new perspectives,
The New_ Public team
Illustrations by Josh Kramer
Civic Signals is a partnership between the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas, Austin, and the National Conference on Citizenship, and was incubated by New America.