🏖️ Beach Reads and Survey Vibes
Revisiting our 2020 survey and settling into summer
One year ago yesterday, we sent our newsletter readers a survey as we were getting ready to transition over to New_ Public. Today, we’re going to share some of what readers told us they thought was important, and then we’d like you to take this year’s survey. Next month, we’ll compare this year and last year and see what’s changed.
Also, we have a word from our departing editor Marina, and our version of summer Beach Reads.
The 2020 Survey
A year ago, there was a lot of uncertainty in the air: we didn’t know who would be the next president, or even if a vaccine would emerge and let us quickly get back to our lives. We had just come out of a June of unprecedented Black Lives Matter protests and a muted Pride celebration. For those of us lucky enough to work from home, life was on Zoom, and most of us had already burnt out on Animal Crossing.
The survey was sent out in our heady, early days. This newsletter has always had incredible readers, but we especially value and give our thanks to the intrepid few who were willing to answer our questions and help our nascent organization figure itself out. Now, we’re once again refocusing the newsletter, and it’s useful to review a sampling of the responses we received back in July 2020:
What have you most enjoyed about our newsletter thus far?
It's easy to be pessimistic in such times but consistently this newsletter gives me optimism & surfaces content I perhaps wouldn't see otherwise.
It cropped up about the same time I was casually wondering about lessons online and offline spaces could learn from each other.
What would you say are the (3) most interesting conversations happening in your workplace / industry / group of peers right now re: the future of tech and digital spaces?
1) monopolization in the tech space (ie the disproportionate power of google, amazon etc) 2) how tech can be used to make access to government and community services easier 3) how we can use digital spaces to form real community, and organize collective action
racial justice in the design industry; dispersed/remote working becoming mainstream; creative coding and coding becoming more "accessible" to non-devs.
1. What does personal space actually look like now? 2. How to retain or improve human interaction while eliminating inefficiencies (esp. in health care and politics) 3. Wtf even is culture, now, and for whatever value it has, how do we take good care of it?
What’s the ONE conversation you’re not seeing right now that you feel is needed to move the conversation about tech / digital spaces forward?
The best approach to combine live video meeting participation with audio visual content presentation with polling methods for both a one time live event and an extended highly visual poll.
accessibility - internet access may be limited for people in rural areas, low income people, etc. webpages and online communities often lack necessary accommodations for people with limited vision, hearing, etc
I always think there's not enough emphasis on "business" (or sustainability) models for healthier tech ecosystems – that is, not just individual business models, but how societies can construct sustainable digital ecosystems
One thing I think about quite a bit is the concept of scalability, which i learnt recently comes from when plantations came to the south?! I guess; we have always assumed BIG giant vertical companies will supersede what we have now, but I'm increasingly thinking the digital future will like a Tokyo high rise; shop on ground, owl cafe on 2nd, club on 3rd - multiple small scale spaces coexisting where we seek and cocreate what we need.
What specific voices would you like to hear more from and about? (This can be specific people, communities, movements, orgs, etc.)
Artists, classicists, and historians
People who have run in-person spaces that were able to bring together people with different world-views. Including architects, and leaders of bottoms-up institutions like churches and the boy scouts.
As much focus as possible on people who aren't (like me) straight, cisgender, white men. Too much of both offline and online spaces are designed from a white (male) default.
In many indigenous cultures, elders would regularly meet with the youngest members of their community to bridge the gap between a) the vitality and promise of youth, and b) the wisdom and reflection of age. I want real, collaborative, and no-bullshit conversations between teens and elders about issues both topical and timeless.
Do you have any other feedback for us? Anything else we should know or that you’d like to share?
I would like to see *even more* crossover between physical and digital public space designers. I understand it's a metaphor, not a direct comparison, but, every time you've done that it's been fascinating, and I could stand for more!
I'm so happy there's a space for this kind of discussion that's not VC/tech twitter dominated!
"Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment." - MacLuhan
The 2021 Survey
We’ve come a long way in the last year, and we have a lot coming up soon that we’re really excited about. But we’re still a young organization, and we highly value your input and thoughtful consideration. So, please, if you have a few minutes, go through our brief (10 minutes or less) survey, especially enhanced with a couple of new questions for 2021.
Goodbyes
This newsletter’s Editor, Marina Garcia-Vasquez, is moving on. Marina brought a lot of energy and purpose to this newsletter, from her incisive interviews to her poignant essays. Here’s her takeaway message she wanted to leave for readers.
A few things I learned during my time with New_ Public:
I am a self described techno-hippie, or rather, I really like the idea of mycelium harnessed as technology and the riffs of Claire Evans on unconventional computing movements reimagining computers not from rocks but from slime molds or looking at trees to understand how technology could work like the Wood Wide Web.
I believe that Design Justice Principles should also be applied to our physical designed environments, especially for tech headquarters and places of work.
I believe in a technosocial future where we stop thinking about technology as gadgets but instead as human practice, as Shannon Vallor describes: “the interrelated political, cultural, economic, environmental, and historical factors that co-direct human innovation and practice.”
I get very excited about women making spreadsheets as archival tools of resistance. To be exact, Mindy Seu’s The Cyberfeminism Index, commissioned by Rhizome and premiered at the New Museum.
I cannot wait to see the splendid spaces these women create: Legacy Russell as the Chief Curator at The Kitchen, Annika Hansteen-Izora building Somewhere Good, and anything that Kamal Sinclair and The Guild of Future Architects conceive for the world.
Thank you! You can follow Marina on Twitter, or at her website.
The new Editor of the newsletter will be me, Josh Kramer. If you’re a longtime reader of the newsletter, you’ve likely read my words and seen my drawings or designs. In a few weeks, I’ll have a chance to properly introduce myself, as well as a new staff member who will also be working on the newsletter. As we start to reimagine what we want the newsletter to be, we’ll be looking at your survey responses, so again, thanks in advance for taking the survey.
5 Beach Read Links
Not everyone can take time off from work, or make it to the beach, but for many of us, the long, hot lazy days of July are a great time to read, watch, or listen to something else entirely. With that spirit in mind, here is our curated mini-playlist of fun and/or interesting links that gel with our mission of flourishing digital public spaces, or are just otherwise great.
The Three-Body Problem | Cixin Liu | Prose Novel
OK, admittedly this is not likely the first time you have heard about this wildly imaginative science fiction book, but just in case: If you like epic stories with complicated science that are light on characterization, this Chinese novel from 2008 is a winner. But even if you don’t, it’s worth checking out. The treatment of technology and computing are exactly the kind of Big Thinking we love talking about in our Show and Tell. (BTW: we are thinking about starting a Book club, please tell us your picks and if you’d be interested in the survey.) Enjoy it in the most New_ Public way possible by borrowing the eBook from your local library via the excellent Libby app.
We Dwell in Possibility | Robert Yang & Eleanor Davis | Interactive art project | lightly NSFW
You know how some art is better if you don’t think too much about it? This “queer gardening simulation” by game maker Robert Yang and one of my favorite working cartoonists, Eleanor Davis, is just a joy to experience and watch unfold. “For the longest time,” writes Yang, “I've wanted to make a gay mobile game, but I was unsure how to get my queer politics past Apple and Google's anti-sexuality censors.” Now, with the backing of Manchester International Festival, or MIF, we get to enjoy this. There are obvious topical connections with digital placemaking and online communities, but honestly, just check it out for a deeply weird and meditative ten minutes.
How Twitter can ruin a life | Emily VanDerWerff | Longform news feature
This long, deeply-felt article may not be exactly what you expect from the title. But the subtitle gets at the sad, strange story unspooled within: “Isabel Fall’s sci-fi story ‘I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter’ drew the ire of the internet. This is what happened next.” Most of us who use Twitter have mixed feelings about it, but this article does a great job at pulling apart the individual, human cost of ‘context collapse’ as well as what we are losing collectively as a society.
The Tyranny Of Time | Joe Zadeh | Longform historical feature
An excellent long essay of the sort that makes you re-evaluate deeply held beliefs, such as, ‘time is a natural phenomena.’ I know that sounds really spacey, but this is well-reasoned, completely fact-based, and entertaining. I was shocked to learn that Benedictine monks, who I had previously thought were harmless fellows responsible for excellent cheese and spirits, may in fact be ‘the original founders of modern capitalism.’ This short video (above) is a must-watch companion piece.
What Are You Doing With Your Life? The Tail End | Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell | Animated video
Kurzgesagt is almost like the xkcd of YouTube, tackling fascinating, often hard science topics and making them immediately accessible and entertaining. This ambitious video attempts to contextualize the human lifespan and encourages viewers to take an active role in how they spend their life. In less deft, or overly emotional hands, this topic might be treacly or over the top, but from Kurzgesagt, it comes off as inspiring and affirmational, at least to me. This is perfectly timed to this transitional phase of the pandemic, when many, many people seem to be reconsidering big parts of their lives.
Using plenty of sunscreen,
Josh Kramer
Illustration by me
New_ Public 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.