➡️🌳🏘️ This must be the place
Why local communities matter more than ever
We are seeking a Head of External Engagement and Community Engagement Lead, Local Lab to join our team.
Like a lot of Americans, I’m still sorting out what the 2024 election means. But I’ve noticed something interesting:
In this moment, a lot of folks are prioritizing putting energy into local community-building. Again and again, I’m seeing enthusiastic calls for strengthening local bonds. Here’s Wikipedian and Crypto critic Molly White:
Find your communities. Most people have many communities: the friend group you hang out with in real life, your family, your neighbors, your internet friends, your coworkers, your church or synagogue or mosque or other religious community. Strengthen these communities. If you don’t feel like you have much in the way of community, begin forming them: join new social groups, and try to meet likeminded people near you. Introduce yourself to your neighbors.
White is seemingly taking a page from Robert Putnam in emphasizing local groups, and she’s not alone. We’ve seen the value of this in our own work, going back to the beginning. One of the four building blocks of our Civic Signals research is “Act,” with the signals “Boost community resilience” and “Support civic action.”
More recently, we’ve seen the power and potential of local digital spaces, which we’re focusing on with our Local Lab. We’ve learned a lot about these groups in the last year. And because my neighborhood in Washington, D.C., really needed one of these groups, I started moderating an inactive Facebook group here. Thanks to New_ Public’s guide for local stewards, in about two months I’ve taken my group from 45 people to, as of this writing, 190 neighbors. We have a long way to go, but already people are sharing photos of ginkgo leaves turning yellow, talking about starting book clubs, and organizing opportunities to volunteer.
And already I’m coming up against the difficulties of Facebook — my group’s posts are jumbled in my neighbors’ main feeds, alongside nonsense like Shrimp Jesus. It’s tough forming a community on these platforms, which care more about the ads they sell than the people seeing those ads.
To really serve communities, and really reach the potential of local digital spaces, we may need to think outside the box and try something new. Our recent research into Front Porch Forum has shown us that other business models, moderation approaches, and platform structures can be better than the status quo. We’re thinking hard about what that means for us right now.
Giving thanks and being thankful
Even outside of this election, I find myself thinking about local-ness around this time of year. Thanksgiving is the holiday I most associate with putting down roots and considering where I came from. A few years ago, I reflected on the origins of Thanksgiving, as well as the overlooked technologies and perspectives of the Indigenous people who were already living in North America for over 10,000 years before that.
In a modern context, it’s kind of mind boggling to think about yourself as part of a lineage with a connection to a place that goes back thousands of years. And yet, maybe in the course of human history, that’s actually the norm, and the way we live now is something more like an anomaly.
I’ll leave you with this excerpt from the podcast How to Survive the End of the World, and their episode with Norma Wong, Hawaiian Zen Buddhist and author of When No Thing Works: A Zen and Indigenous Perspective on Resilience, Shared Purpose, and Leadership in the Timeplace of Collapse.
There was a time when all of the peoples of the world were indigenous.
So if you cannot call yourself Indigenous today, it is only because your indigeneity was disconnected from you so long ago that you cannot say that you have any cultural or sociopolitical or cellular memory of it. But every single person, by definition, at one point in their history, the tens of thousands of years of history, were Indigenous. And in an indigenous state, one of the aspects of your indigeneity is that your sense of time was entirely different.
You had a notion of rootedness, deeply in the past, so long ago that you would not remember the first ancestor, and you would have a sense of your responsibility to a future, that is so far in the future, you do not yet have numbers and names for the numbers of years and the names of the people that will follow that. That's an orientation that you’d have. And it wouldn't be just about only a few people having it. Everyone in the village, everyone on the hill, everyone living in the desert would have that orientation. And some would be stepping into it more, but everyone would have that. And so, that aspect of what it is that we had, I believe is an essential skill to reignite today and that it is a human thing that we have forgotten.
I call it the horizon story. If we aren't just looking down on the ground, and if we look out, just standing tall with some pride, we could have a sense of actual, physically-embodied sense, that there is not only a horizon but something beyond it.
So this is not a metaphorical thing, right? All of the technology has trapped us into very small spaces and into the word salad of our conversations, where we just go round and round and round, and concepts and ideas.
And that if we look up and we stand in our pride, we can begin to entice the possibilities. And look at the possibilities beyond the fraught-ness of the current moment, beyond the apocalyptic moment, which by the way, will come upon us whether we think about it or not, or worry about it or not, or figure out strategies into it or not.
It is a thing that will come upon us, or I would say, that we are in now. We are in it now. So beyond that fraught moment, less of a wildly imagining moment, but the moment that you would prepare your people for, if you had that responsibility.
So a long arc responsibility is, everyone stands in responsibility of each other, and we know we have to build and cultivate the conditions for that thriving to occur.
We will have more to say on this in 2025, but for now maybe it’s enough that we’re considering our long arc responsibility, way beyond the next four years. Is there technology we can build that doesn’t trap us into small spaces? Together, can we make something for the years that don’t yet have numbers and the people who don’t yet have names?
Write for this newsletter
We’re once again putting out the call: if you’re a regular reader of this newsletter and think you might like to become a contributor, please reach out. We typically pay $500 per complete newsletter draft.
Please email hello(at)newpublic(dot)org with “Writing for the newsletter” in the subject line, and up to three links to relevant samples of your writing. Write a brief introduction, and feel free to name some topics you might be interested in writing about. Looking through our archive first is a great call, but here are some tips:
Not a great fit for us:
Reviews of new technology
Freewheeling personal essays
Investigative reporting
Marketing or advertising
Up our alley:
A book report on a classic or new work on social media or communities
A deep dive into an unusual but highly relevant piece of the social internet
A guide to a complex issue related to the social web
Profiling an interesting local digital space
I’m also happy to assign a topic if we want to work together. I’m looking forward to hearing from you.
Circling back after the holidays,
– Josh Kramer, New_ Public Head of Editorial