đ§ đď¸ Navigating the digital landscape of a real city
From BBS to Nextdoor: tracing the history of online spaces for local communities
Our friends at Reboot are releasing the newest issue of their magazine, Kernel, and will be hosting their first-ever symposium to celebrate next Saturday, March 23, in SF. Weâll be there, hosting a workshop. More below!
Weâre big fans of Reboot. Like New_ Public, they are a community of technologists who have a lot of hopes for a better internet and world. So many of Rebootâs members are younger technology workers and computer science majors, and we often feel inspired by their writing, in both Rebootâs newsletter and its self-published magazine, Kernel.
Weâve re-published some of this writing before, and now weâre proud to do so again here. In the piece below, writer Humphrey Obuobi will introduce a topic weâre getting really interested in: digital spaces for local communities. Humphrey provides an excellent background summary to this rich subject.Â
If youâre interested in this topic and based in the Bay Area, I hope youâll join me on Saturday, March 23rd, at KQED in San Francisco, for Rebootâs first ever Community Day. Iâll be leading a workshop related to this piece and New_ Publicâs work: the past, present and future of local forums. Come imagine the possibilities with me, and Iâll give you a glimpse of our vision, dreams, and plans.Â
Youâve been hearing for a long time about what we think about the social media ecosystem, but weâve been light on details about our strategy for changing it. This spring, thatâs all about to change â buckle up. Weâre excited to begin to share this with you.
âJosh Kramer, New_ Public Head of Editorial
Searching For My CityÂ
By Humphrey ObuobiÂ
Read the original at Reboot
Despite its name, Cafe International is very distinctly âSan Francisco.â A chalkboard menu (characteristic of other cafes in the city that grew up in the â90s) offers everything from smoothies to baba ganoush for the full spectrum of residents that come through its doors. For years, the space has also been home to poets and jazz musicians who regularly fill the evening air with their tunes. Zahra, the owner, has evidently spent decades pouring her heart and soul into the place, transforming it from a run-down cafe into the vibrant, reliable âtown squareâ that it is today. Even after moving across the Bay, Iâm unfailingly greeted with laughter and warmth whenever Iâm in the neighborhood.Â
Of everything that fills that room, I think nothing captures the essence of Cafe International better than its celebrated bulletin board. Itâs a behemoth in its own right, spanning much of the entryway and hosting dozens of advertisements; this week, itâs filled with posters for music lessons, a new pottery studio, a drag show, a meditation retreat, and other quintessential San Francisco offerings. Every poster feels like a link to something new and exciting around me that I wouldnât have known about otherwise. Patched together on the board, they are a map of a diverse city that is actively and continually shaped by residents. It is âinternationalâ in some ways, yes, but deeply local in others.
But online, I would be hard-pressed to find the same concentration of local people, discussion, and culture that this humble cafe is able to create. The painful reality is that the internet somehow makes it easier to find friends who live halfway across the world than to connect with the people who live down the street. From my point of view, weâre already one foot into a metaverse of sorts â a web of online communities, information, and experiences that all too often exclude the people and places we physically contend with each day and depend on for our survival. Thereâs some beauty in our ability to explore beyond home so easily, but thereâs also a risk of forgetting, of losing our relationship with what actually sustains our lives.Â
So despite the internetâs boundless capacity for connection and expression, Iâm still searching for my city online.Â
Dialing In
Before the meteoric rise of the World Wide Web, Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) were a popular form of communication and digital community. Operated by individuals or small groups, BBSs were essentially text-based websites that users could dial into using a modem and phone line. In many ways, they resembled early internet forums and offered ways for users to post messages, share files, play games, and participate in online discussions. The humble hobbyists that ran them played a crucial role in the early development of digital culture in these early days, gathering people in the miniature worlds that they created. Most importantly, they were local; these systems relied on dial-up connections, and the fees for long-distance transmissions disincentivized cross-country or even statewide connections.
Early on in this movement, the Community Memory Project took that limitation and doubled-down on it by placing computer terminals in supermarkets, record stores, cafes, and laundromats all across the Bay Area.1 Born from the countercultural roots of Berkeleyâs Free Speech Movement, the founders hoped to create a local network of information that always pointed back to the person providing it (basically, a digital bulletin board). The first terminal in Leopoldâs Records helped rising musicians find collaborators, clients, and other resources in the area to advance their craft, and over the course of its 20 year tenure, the Project supported a healthy ecosystem of spontaneous relationships through a local, digital commons. In the words of Lee Felsenstein, â[they] opened the door to cyberspace and found that it was hospitable territoryâ â not just to countercultural computer geeks, but to just about any neighbor who happened upon one of their terminals.Â
When the internet came along, a daring few built on these early examples to create digital twins of the cities where they were based. Blacksburg Electronic Village was one of these experiments, initiated as a joint-venture between Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) and the Virginia Institute of Technology and built specifically to âincrease access to and participation in community lifeâ. Research on the BEV often refers to it as a âcommunity networkâ through which churches, clubs, senior centers, and more could share information and coordinate their activities; apparently, most of the networkâs use boiled down to education, civic interests, and supporting local social relations. By the end of its tenure, BEV was universal to Blacksburg in the way Facebook (or the Meta ecosystem) is near-universal to the world â nearly 87% of the city was connected through the electronic village, and actively used it to mediate their relationship with the place they loved and lived in.
Examples like Community Memory and BEV captured an optimistic vision of how computers and networks can assist in âplacemakingâ: the open, participatory process of shaping a physical space through the dreams and histories of the people who live there. In these early infrastructures, every graze with the machine reinforced the importance of the people that you lived with, rather than pulling your attention away from them. Meetups in the physical sites of these networks were common and reinforced social bonds with people you may have never met otherwise. Jack Carroll (a professor at Penn State and archivist of the Blacksburg network) once said that BEV was about creating a ânew way of lifeâ â one that was deeply connected and yet rooted in place.Â
To be fair, much of this local orientation is because there wasnât an alternative when these experiments arose. Over the years, the âconnectedâ part of internet culture has intensified, but weâve traded depth for breadth and our internet communities now sustain an infinite number of worlds and subcultures beyond what our cities and towns could apparently offer. But with the slow demise of these local social networks (a trend influenced by far more than just technology), I still canât help but wonder what weâve lost along the way.Â
Tapping Out
Even as the online world expanded beyond the local, mapping the world never ceased to be a fascination. With the rise of geographical information systems (GIS) and other supporting technologies, early pioneers like Mapquest aspired to put maps on the World Wide Web. Google Maps quickly took over by investing more heavily in easy navigation and mobile technology, making the map a utility for just about anyone with a smartphone. Combined with the ability to track usersâ locations in real time through mobile GPS, location-based services went from a novel fascination to an everyday encounter, with recommendations and advertisements for businesses and services becoming an inseparable part of the digital economy.Â
With all of these developments, modern digital platforms have made reviewing the places around you the most common way of engaging with your city or town. Yelp, Foursquare, and Google Maps provide star ratings for just about every âpoint of interestâ around you, whether itâs a pizza parlor or a park. This tendency shapes the default definitions of places around us as well: a brief search of âLower Haightâ yields a never-ending list of things to see and do, ranked lists of restaurants, and moving guides for those who might consider Lower Haight their new home.Â
But these platforms donât really scratch my itch for finding a sense of community online. With the exception of a few pictures of families walking through the cityâs parks, scrolling through Instagramâs hard-to-find âPlacesâ feed for San Francisco is chock full of semi-professional food pictures and tourists posing in front of landmarks. It is a series of atomized (and often commercialized) experiences that happen to be co-located; no one is encouraged to make meaning of the place they live in together or question the way that things are, much less actually spend time with friends and neighbors. Perhaps worse, it presents a surface-level understanding of a place that I know to be incredibly diverse, full of people of many backgrounds, languages, and lores. Opportunities for connection are generally removed from the picture, even more elusive than the Places feed is to begin with.Â
The trend towards consumption within location-based platforms is something that William Payne (a geography and urbanism professor at Rutgers University) describes well through his piece âCrawling the City.â As highlighted in his studies, the quantification of a businessâs character through views and five-star reviews feeds into a speculative perception of place; by seeing which places and spaces are becoming âhot,â developers and entrepreneurs from around the world are able to target new sites for growth. While the underlying socioeconomic shifts of urban life are clearly influenced by much more than just Yelp reviews, the production and interactions on these platforms might actually accelerate the gentrification of these places, and the displacement of the very people who made that place special at all.Â
This orientation reinforces the idea that the city itself is something to be consumed, rather than co-created among its residents. Thereâs a stark difference between this âway of beingâ and that of the Community Memory Project or BEV, which were designed to facilitate both online and offline engagement with the same group of people over time within the environment that they shared. When todayâs platforms do focus on location, hosting civic or cultural dialogue is more of a risk than a benefit; in fact, both Google Maps and Yelp often remove content that is considered overly political or otherwise unrelated to the individualâs perception of the space. This might be okay if there were alternatives for meaningful local connection or dialogue, but given that most social networks never prioritize place-based interactions, it seems that weâre left with little idea of what our cities are for but to serve us.Â
Of course, none of this is to say that neighbors arenât talking to each other online. Over the years, Iâve collected my fair share of groupchats and email lists based in the Bay Area, for everything from house music to mutual aid. Craigslist has remained an invaluable utility for finding used goods or places to live (and occasionally, delighting in peopleâs romantic âmissed connectionsâ). But too often, these groups feel like rare and infrequent accessories to the usual modes of online social interaction that whisk our attention away from the people around us. Collectively, they lack the gravity necessary to reestablish a sense of responsibility for the people and places around us.Â
In these isolated oases, I find some hope â but I am still searching.
Tuning In
Thereâs almost nothing preventing us from creating online communities that are more firmly rooted in place. The same infrastructure that enables connection across oceans can connect people who live right next door to one another, and reap similar or magnified benefits for everyone by doing so. Thereâs no reason why these online communities canât thrive at multiple scales simultaneously, either; how culture and politics evolve in San Francisco and Oakland can translate to Accra and Hong Kong. That balance (and tension)Â between the local and global is an essential theme of our modern world.Â
Still, this isnât to say that building and sustaining place-based digital networks is easy. Like many other projects like it, both the Community Memory Project and Blacksburg Electronic Village eventually shriveled due to a lack of funding and an inability to compete with the rise of the internet and home computers. In more recent years, Nextdoor also promised to âcultivate a kinder world where everyone has a neighborhood they can rely on,â raising millions of dollars and acquiring a host of smaller local networking companies and organizations along the way. But in its relentless pursuit of scale (and the advertising revenue that comes from it), the demographics gradually homogenized and less investment went into the cultural features that would have helped it shine. Itâs fairly well-documented at this point that the most popular place-based application is less of a town square and more of a homeownerâs association, suppressing political speech and fearmongering about unhoused individuals (often with anti-Black undertones). Without the same attention to conscious hosting and onboarding that the original community network stewards adopted, this and platforms like it often devolve into fiery conflict, misinformation, and harassment.Â
While itâs often frustrating to see how todayâs platforms subsume or commodify the notion of place by default, Iâve been thankful to find inspiration through DIY internet radio stations in the Bay Area, such as HydeFM, BFF, and Lower Grand Radio. The studios themselves, growing quietly in unexpected corners of their respective cities, are often brimming with energy once you step inside; artists, DJs, producers, and show hosts mingle as their friends spin their art on air. Their shows are often broadcast online 24/7, and their websites often include chat rooms for audiences across the world â or down the street â to connect with each other and the music. Stitched together, these hybrid online-offline places feel like cauldrons for local culture, actively encouraging everyone from all backgrounds to add something into the mix. The result is magical: a medley of sounds and perspectives that could exist nowhere but here.
Of all places, this is where I find my city online, alive and well. Itâs nothing extraordinary, really; the technology that these communities use to stream their shows has existed for decades at this point. What inspires me about these internet communities is the fact that they are so open, designed to welcome a broad swathe of the city onto their airwaves or into their events. Itâs their embrace of the connective power of the internet balanced with their emphasis on place. Itâs their cultural value, and how they add a new page to the history of the city with every day they stream. With a faithful focus on the creative communities they support, they are emblematic of a new way of living together in a digitally-mediated city.Â
Like Felsenstein said in his reflections on the Community Memory Project, I still believe that the internet is a hospitable territory, even for those of us who love our cities. Sustaining these online communities locally is still probably harder than it is to build more dispersed networks, and the draw of the latter is strong. But if we are willing to try, we might just discover an unmatched richness in the places the people around us.
Thanks Humphrey!
Trying to remember how to re-inflate these bike tires,
âJosh
Josh: time readers will remember weâve written about Community Memory before in the newsletter, but this is aat summary.
Tayâs illustration is amazing