📣 A New Year, A New Way of Meeting

Meeting each other in digital public space can be magical.

Jan 03, 2021

Welcome to New_ Public where new beginnings meet opportunities for online convening. In this issue, a note from our new editor, our Signals research and framework launch soon, and join us on January 12-14 to experience experiments in publicness at our New_ Public Festival.

Editor’s Note

Shannon Vallor writes in Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting, “A futurist’s true aim is not to envision the technological future but our technosocial future—a future defined not by which gadgets we invent, but by how our evolving technological powers become embedded in co-evolving social practices, values, and institutions.

When we think of living better with AI, social media, digital surveillance, and other emergent technologies, are we ruminating on what Vallor calls “the interrelated political, cultural, economic, environmental, and historical factors that co-direct human innovation and practice”? You are here with me because you ARE a practitioner in this space thinking about our technosocial future.

As we embark on a new year, ripe with potential, I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself in this new space as editor of New_ Public. As a journalist, I have always been in close proximity to technology: the artists who repurpose platforms and software into wondrous worlds, the entrepreneurs who see the potential for forging new paths of being.

So I am excited to join Civic Signals in considering how we can redesign new ways of convening in a digital world. I am a systems person who enjoys finding new methods for efficient communication. As a person who has worked in the digital realm for a long time, I understand the repercussions of personal action and behaviors so I am thoughtful about how we show up for our readers, each other as a team, and how we reach the communities we are invested in reaching.

I see my role here to coalesce a diverse community and hold space for a variety of thoughts and imaginations. As we continue to develop the metaphor of public spaces for good into the creation of digital civic spaces for more, I will uphold intersectional thinking onto the various industries and disciplines we must reckon with. As we dream of our technosocial futures, what can we do in the now? How can we put our theories into practice?

I like to be grounded in the idea that we are fractals. How adrienne maree brown writes in her book emergent strategy that what we practice on a small scale can reverberate to the largest scale. As a woman of color, I am most exhilarated by the notion of upending systems of oppression as we know them. What do you find most exhilarating by working in this space? Which systems would you like to upend?

The Building Blocks for Our Civic Signals

For the last several years, Civic Signals has been developing a framework to help evaluate and design more flourishing digital spaces. We’ll be sharing the framework — including the 14 Civic Signals at our upcoming New_ Public festival on January 12 during the What flourishing online spaces have in common session.

Led by our co-directors, Eli Pariser and Talia Stroud of the University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Media Engagement, Civic Signals conducted extensive literature reviews, talked to hundreds of experts from around the world and with a range of ideological viewpoints, including sociologists, political scientists, philosophers, activists, and technologists. Then we conducted focus groups and a 20-country survey to validate our findings. Over two years of research, we found the key qualities — what we are calling the Signals — of digital public space clustered in four “building blocks.”

A flourishing digital public space should be welcoming and safe for diverse publics, help us understand and make sense of the world, connect people near and far across hierarchies of power, and enable us to act together.

Next week, we will be updating our website to include our 14 Signals as an interactive primer, whitepapers available for downloading on our site to become tools for dissemination and education. To better illustrate and engage a wider public discourse, we have also produced a collection of videos to coincide with the research. We hope that our Signals inspire those who work in the digital space to build spaces that serve the public and that these tools lead to lively conversations.

Experiments in Publicness at the New_ Public Festival

Every day of our festival we have scheduled interventions from artistic collaborators to engage us in a connected online community. They will orchestrate us in realms of thought, play, or seeing anew and our hope is that we unflatten the way people think about convenings on the web. Join us and join in as these artists each bring their own abundance to our festivities:

Lars Jan is the artistic director of Early Morning Opera, a performance and art lab, exploring emerging technologies, live audiences, and building experiences. Each EMO project is experimental and responsive to the audience, from a staging of Joan Didion’s The White Album as a theater performance to Jan’s exploration of his father’s work as a Cold Era operative in The Institute of Memory through transformative physical and digital structures. For the festival, he will present Exploring the space in between on January 12 at 11:35 AM EST.

Lauren McCarthy is an artist, open source contributor, and associate professor of design media arts at UCLA. McCarthy investigates how we find connection through technology during social distancing in her multimedia series titled I heard Talking is Dangerous. The artist delivered a touring monologue via phone screen and text-to-speech to IRL participants to examine ideas of danger and safety. For the festival, she will host the Feeling seen/being watched experience on January 13 at 11:25 AM EST.

Stephanie Dinkins is a transdisciplinary artist creating art about AI that intersects race, gender, and history. In Secret Garden, the artist weaves oral histories of Black women through an immersive web experience. For the festival, she opens the day on January 14 with Multigenerational memoir of a black American family told from the perspective of an artificial intelligence of evolving intellect at 11:35 AM EST.

Coney are interactive theater makers who follow the principles of adventure and curiosity. The group has created the Pop-Up Playhouse for ongoing play, games, and fun. For the festival, Tassos Stevens will lead an immersive experience titled Telephone for the Choose Your Own Adventure segments (sign up required) on January 12 and 13 at 7:00 PM EST.

Dialup is an artist-made app by Danielle Baskin and Max Hawkins that celebrates telephone culture by connecting users at predetermined times to talk about specific subjects. The voice-based social network wants to reinvent our notion of the phone call. Festival participants will have the ability to be paired with other festival participants in a phone conversation around a prompt on January 12 and 13 at 5:00 PM EST.

This week’s additions to the Digital Public Spaces list

This week’s additions to the Digital Public Spaces list are Data4BlackLives, DailyHaloha and USDigitalResponse. Our list of people and organizations working to build a public-friendly Internet is updated weekly and always growing—who else should we add?

What’s Clicking

🌐 Online:

Everything you need to know about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. (The Verge)
What are online events for? By way of Benedict Evans. (Substack)
Listen to A Civic Vision for the Internet podcast featuring Eli Pariser. (Your undivided attention)
Join the Infrastructure Appreciation Society! (Wired)
To support the coming wave of organized labor in tech, unions need to modernize. (Modus)
The pandemic has made us even more dependent on a highly invasive technological ecosystem. (PEN Canada)

🏙 Offline: Design Ideas from Cities

A visual history of mutual aid. Tens of thousands of mutual aid networks and projects emerged around the world in 2020. (Citylab)
In China, citizen journalists try to offer more independent reporting, but their work is often censored and they are routinely punished. (New York Times)
NYC’s subway used to be for everyone. In a city with vast economic inequality, three institutions chip away at those barriers: the library system, parks, and the subway. (Motherboard)
“Flowers are serious.” Urban planner and architect Stefano Boeri was hired to design an image to inspire people to get vaccinated in Italy. (New York Times)

🔁 From the Community:

Every year the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign works to make more Black, brown, indigenous, and trans women visible online. Download their resource guide here. (Whose Knowledge)
Sandister Tei of Accra, Ghana, founded the first Ghanaian Wikimedia community. (Wikimedia Foundation)
As always, our Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn will keep you updated on all things digital public space throughout the week.
Thinking of ways to create a reciprocal exchange,
Marina Garcia-Vasquez
Branding by Akufen
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.