🤳🏼 Join Us for Two Events on Digital Pandemic Life
We launch our Terra Incognita NYC project with a community roundtable and collaborative hangout.
Over the next few weeks, we invite you to join us for two events dedicated to the launch of our collaborative project Terra Incognita NYC with Mona Sloane, a fellow with New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge. The project focuses on mapping out the unknown digital public spaces – terra incognita – in the nation’s largest city.
Upcoming Events:
Collaborative Collage + Doodling (3/24 5pm EST)
Terra Incognita NYC Launch Event (3/30 5pm EST)
Last year, when everything shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, New_ Public teamed up with Professor Sloane and five ethnographers who collected data on how the physical communities of New York City moved online.
Through a rapid response ethnography project throughout the five boroughs, we heard how diverse communities changed their social norms to create new online cultures. Some examples included a Ghanaian Church in the Bronx, a Pokémon Go community in Manhattan, the Brooklyn Public Library, an LGBTQ community center in Queens, and a walking group in Staten Island. All of these communities changed their physical practices to digital spaces, for better and for worse.
As this cultural shift online occurred, some well-known physical and digital issues remained: harassment, political polarization, the digital divide, racialized policing of public space, disproportionately impacted communities and individuals, and reliance on private infrastructure.
The Terra Incognita NYC project asks: How do people “do” public space online, in a pandemic? And under what conditions? Does “the digital” make a difference? Who dictates the conditions for digital spaces, and to what ends?
This work culminated in a rich collection of ethnographies, case studies, and insights for building for the future. One year later, we want to share these findings with you through the Terra Incognita NYC research report and two events. Join us!
Wednesday, March 30th 5pm EST: Launch Roundtable Discussion
On March 30th, New_ Public will release our research paper with a roundtable discussion between New_ Public’s Eli Pariser, NYU’s Mona Sloane, Chief Technology Officer of New York City John Paul Farmer, Community Tech NY’s Monique Tate, and urban studies scholar Garnette Cadogan.
We’ll dive into the insights from the project and collectively discuss: how have our expectations about digital public life shifted? And what can technologists, policymakers, urban designers researchers, and community advocates learn from the last year?
We will dedicate time for guests to meet each other and leave their own reactions to the project’s Miro map, a collaborative and interactive tool we will use to reflect.
Please RSVP to the roundtable discussion here.
Wednesday, March 24th at 5pm EST: Collaborative Collage + Doodling
You won’t want to miss our creative hangout coming up this Wednesday. We’ll reflect on the pandemic’s impact on our digital lives and share our experiences digitally, through collage, text, audio and some optional drawing.
Everything we make in this session will become part of the larger, pandemic time capsule project we’re working on for Terra Incognita NYC through our Miro board. We’ll use Miro, a visual collaborative whiteboarding software and talk to each other through a voice channel on our Discord server. We hope to co-create a fun and colorful tapestry of your diverse experiences.
The event — open to all skill levels and ages— will be lead by our colleague and cartoonist, Josh Kramer. Through a voice hangout on Discord, he will guide you through some light collaging and doodle drawing.
Drawing skills are not required, please don't be shy! We'll have things for everyone to play / color with and will onboard people not familiar with Miro to the platform.
** If you want to bring a happy hour beverage, please feel free!
To RSVP to our artmaking session, click here.
New_ Public Phone Stories
We want your stories! Our New_ Public phone stories, an audio archive dedicated to better understanding our digital public lives is underway. At our Terra Incognita NYC events you’ll hear a brief collage of some of the amazing calls we’ve already received, should you need a little inspiration for your own.
Call (646) 653-3937 and answer this prompt:
Recall the most profound connection you made virtually over the past year. Describe the experience, the interaction, and the feeling you had. What made it special to you?
Calls will be preserved alongside the rich ethnographic stories we collected through our Terra Incognita NYC ethnography project. Help us enhance the time capsule with audio that will remind us of our collective hopes and fears during this time. We want to hear from everyone, even if you don’t live in NYC!
Learn more about Terra Incognita NYC here.
Join us in discussion, in creation, in storytelling,
The New_ Public team
Illustrations byJosh 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.