We recently introduced a feature to our newsletter called “Better Know a Concept.” Our first example was “Calm Technology,” a concept first thought up in 90’s Xerox PARC and still relevant today. If we find that an idea, theory, or term keeps surfacing in our conversations about the internet and could use a bit more unpacking, we’ll take a closer look in the newsletter. So we’re asking you:
What’s a concept that you wish everyone knew about?
We’re thinking specifically about ideas that relate to communities online, but we’re extremely open-minded in our interpretation. Extra points for your thoughts on :
how the concept works
an example of it in action and
how it applies to digital public spaces
We are assuming that you, like us, are looking for more flourishing places on the internet. We want this to be one of those places! Please treat others with openness, generosity and respect.
I'll kick off with an idea that's central to New_ Public: digital urban planners. We're going to need people who know how to build communities online, beyond the code required to actually build the sites. A new field dedicated to organizing how humans live/play/work online is needed!
Dec 7, 2021Liked by New_ Public, Josh Kramer, Eli Pariser
Hello, I would love for there to be a greater understanding of how micropayments and metadata could be used to enable digital art use and sharing to pay artists and creators directly, and that this could have been done from the beginning with digital files.
Identity, including pseudo-identities, and pseudo-anonymous identities (like handles and gamer tags). They are going to be key when talking about social networks, groups, communities, and the coming "metaverse" (whatever that ends up meaning, if anything).
I've been thinking about this as it intersections with Communal Computing in the home and office. The intersection of my identities as part of a family, remote worker, parent group, a neighborhood, etc. all intersect at me. This also goes for everyone in my house like my partner, kids, guests, etc.
Privacy problems come up is when information leaks and combines with other pseudo-identities. Nissenbaum's Contextual Integrity says that this happens when a receiver of some data about a subject combines with another context's data. Usually changes in reputation happen which then feels like a privacy violation for me.
Personal data autonomy - I wish everyone would realize that our identities are being digitized and demand control over the data created by their digital self. With open source software it is possible to have a "home base" for your data that only you control and where you give permissioned access to 3rd parties who require it.
Allowing the large corporations (with government blessing) to trap you in their proprietary virtual world where they have total transparency into your every action is not the future I want for myself or my children.
A concept I wish were better-understood, and embraced, is the power and value of protocols.
So many things that look revolutionary can be boiled down to a new reliable protocol, but often the credit is given to something else.
For example, Uber felt, to many people, like something brand-new. But really, it was just the realization that it was now feasible to create an interface so taxis (well, taxi-like vehicle drivers) could publish their locations, and for passengers to ask to be picked up at a location.
When you focus more on the protocol, you become less entrenched in particular companies (we shouldn't have Uber, getting billions in VC money, anyone should be able to use the protocol through whatever app they choose to access the current taxi locations and request one). It also makes new use cases start to pop up: why can't I cross-reference the list of books I want to read, stored in Goodreads, with the books available today at my local library? If both used well-defined protocols, it would be easy.
Protocols stretch back before computers, too. Robert's Rules of Order define a set of protocols for a group of people to make decisions, sometimes much more effectively than they could have by just all saying "we want to do something." And, the real innovation of the Internet wasn't the details of TCP/IP packet headers, it was that once we agreed on a protocol, we could put any kind of data on it, from text posts to robot instructions, and we could send it over any connection, from a high-speed fiber link to a pigeon. Then we had hyperlinks on the Web. We should all keep thinking in these ways. Protocols can sometimes transcend the technology they were imagined with, and would be valuable for everyone to understand better.
One concept I’d love to see gain traction is “Slow Journalism”, how the news is processed and given time to gain perspective, before sharing with the whole world. Most of what we are fed as “news” is not really time-critical, but somehow we are made to believe it is. And we all know the negative consequences of this mad-race to be the first “bearer of news”.
One place I see this in practice is the Indie magazine “Delayed Gratification”, where news and opinion is delivered 3 months later once the dust has settled and perspectives are clearer.
As for how this might affect digital public spaces, I guess we don’t need to look beyond the social media platforms which sometimes whip up mass hysteria over incomplete information and lead to disinformation and manipulation of facts. I wonder how Twitter or Facebook would be if we exercised some judgment before “breaking news” and waiting for the full picture to trickle in before presenting to the world.
Hello, a concept I would love to understand more deeply is translation, both in linguistic expression and in physical expression.
If language is words + physical expression, there must be variation between different language groups in human computer interaction. How might we better understand translation + the accompanying physical rhythms each language group bring to navigating tech?
I wish there was a greater understanding about how folks find love through dating apps, and how romantic connections are fostered both online and IRL. Dating apps are a semi-public space in that there's a community of people on them that share a common trait -- "single" and/or "ready to mingle". But, for a lot of reasons (like safety, etc), the UX of dating apps forces people to be siloed into individual profiles. So, it's a community of "singles" that doesn't really function like a community. But does "love" actually need community in order to flourish? Maybe it doesn't "need" community to exist in all examples, but isn't it more likely to flourish organically and more frequently under community conditions, rather than conditions that aim to "pair" individual/isolated people?
It seems that most dating apps are designed with an assumption that individuals need to be somehow smartly "paired" with each other. Regardless of the mechanism that's supposed to be pairing you (shared answers to questions; attractive pics; witty one-liners) -- is this focus on "pairing" a flawed assumption? Aren't real, authentic relationships less about "pairing" with the right match, and more about sharing context and community with folks, and thus cultivating the conditions that would lead you to share space, life, and -- potentially -- whatever kinda romantic connection you're after?
Researching the different ways folks connect + the relationship between community-building and romantic connections is a really interdisciplinary endeavor. If people understood the intersection of these concepts more -- community; connecting; attraction; "pairing" -- I think dating apps would be designed so differently that you wouldn't be inclined to call them dating apps at all.
A new common sense of fiduciary prudence for the institutional fiduciary owners of intergenerational fiduciary money.
This is the real BIG MONEY in the global economy today and the only social structure for social decision making with the mission, the duty and the scale to finance a new future of climate security and real endgame Sustainability.
But we currently have this money trapped in the casino of Corporate Finance.
How can social media facilitate individual participation in local community engagement in globally curated conversations to upgrade our common sense of what this BIG MONEY really can and should be doing to finance a better future for all?
I'll kick off with an idea that's central to New_ Public: digital urban planners. We're going to need people who know how to build communities online, beyond the code required to actually build the sites. A new field dedicated to organizing how humans live/play/work online is needed!
What about "multi-dimensional infrastructure" as described here? https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/a-vision-for-multidimensional-infrastructure/
Hello, I would love for there to be a greater understanding of how micropayments and metadata could be used to enable digital art use and sharing to pay artists and creators directly, and that this could have been done from the beginning with digital files.
Identity, including pseudo-identities, and pseudo-anonymous identities (like handles and gamer tags). They are going to be key when talking about social networks, groups, communities, and the coming "metaverse" (whatever that ends up meaning, if anything).
I've been thinking about this as it intersections with Communal Computing in the home and office. The intersection of my identities as part of a family, remote worker, parent group, a neighborhood, etc. all intersect at me. This also goes for everyone in my house like my partner, kids, guests, etc.
Privacy problems come up is when information leaks and combines with other pseudo-identities. Nissenbaum's Contextual Integrity says that this happens when a receiver of some data about a subject combines with another context's data. Usually changes in reputation happen which then feels like a privacy violation for me.
Personal data autonomy - I wish everyone would realize that our identities are being digitized and demand control over the data created by their digital self. With open source software it is possible to have a "home base" for your data that only you control and where you give permissioned access to 3rd parties who require it.
Allowing the large corporations (with government blessing) to trap you in their proprietary virtual world where they have total transparency into your every action is not the future I want for myself or my children.
A concept I wish were better-understood, and embraced, is the power and value of protocols.
So many things that look revolutionary can be boiled down to a new reliable protocol, but often the credit is given to something else.
For example, Uber felt, to many people, like something brand-new. But really, it was just the realization that it was now feasible to create an interface so taxis (well, taxi-like vehicle drivers) could publish their locations, and for passengers to ask to be picked up at a location.
When you focus more on the protocol, you become less entrenched in particular companies (we shouldn't have Uber, getting billions in VC money, anyone should be able to use the protocol through whatever app they choose to access the current taxi locations and request one). It also makes new use cases start to pop up: why can't I cross-reference the list of books I want to read, stored in Goodreads, with the books available today at my local library? If both used well-defined protocols, it would be easy.
Protocols stretch back before computers, too. Robert's Rules of Order define a set of protocols for a group of people to make decisions, sometimes much more effectively than they could have by just all saying "we want to do something." And, the real innovation of the Internet wasn't the details of TCP/IP packet headers, it was that once we agreed on a protocol, we could put any kind of data on it, from text posts to robot instructions, and we could send it over any connection, from a high-speed fiber link to a pigeon. Then we had hyperlinks on the Web. We should all keep thinking in these ways. Protocols can sometimes transcend the technology they were imagined with, and would be valuable for everyone to understand better.
One concept I’d love to see gain traction is “Slow Journalism”, how the news is processed and given time to gain perspective, before sharing with the whole world. Most of what we are fed as “news” is not really time-critical, but somehow we are made to believe it is. And we all know the negative consequences of this mad-race to be the first “bearer of news”.
One place I see this in practice is the Indie magazine “Delayed Gratification”, where news and opinion is delivered 3 months later once the dust has settled and perspectives are clearer.
As for how this might affect digital public spaces, I guess we don’t need to look beyond the social media platforms which sometimes whip up mass hysteria over incomplete information and lead to disinformation and manipulation of facts. I wonder how Twitter or Facebook would be if we exercised some judgment before “breaking news” and waiting for the full picture to trickle in before presenting to the world.
please see this thread you've probably already seen about information architecture: https://twitter.com/eaton/status/1467926228720140296
Hello, a concept I would love to understand more deeply is translation, both in linguistic expression and in physical expression.
If language is words + physical expression, there must be variation between different language groups in human computer interaction. How might we better understand translation + the accompanying physical rhythms each language group bring to navigating tech?
I wish there was a greater understanding about how folks find love through dating apps, and how romantic connections are fostered both online and IRL. Dating apps are a semi-public space in that there's a community of people on them that share a common trait -- "single" and/or "ready to mingle". But, for a lot of reasons (like safety, etc), the UX of dating apps forces people to be siloed into individual profiles. So, it's a community of "singles" that doesn't really function like a community. But does "love" actually need community in order to flourish? Maybe it doesn't "need" community to exist in all examples, but isn't it more likely to flourish organically and more frequently under community conditions, rather than conditions that aim to "pair" individual/isolated people?
It seems that most dating apps are designed with an assumption that individuals need to be somehow smartly "paired" with each other. Regardless of the mechanism that's supposed to be pairing you (shared answers to questions; attractive pics; witty one-liners) -- is this focus on "pairing" a flawed assumption? Aren't real, authentic relationships less about "pairing" with the right match, and more about sharing context and community with folks, and thus cultivating the conditions that would lead you to share space, life, and -- potentially -- whatever kinda romantic connection you're after?
Researching the different ways folks connect + the relationship between community-building and romantic connections is a really interdisciplinary endeavor. If people understood the intersection of these concepts more -- community; connecting; attraction; "pairing" -- I think dating apps would be designed so differently that you wouldn't be inclined to call them dating apps at all.
A new common sense of fiduciary prudence for the institutional fiduciary owners of intergenerational fiduciary money.
This is the real BIG MONEY in the global economy today and the only social structure for social decision making with the mission, the duty and the scale to finance a new future of climate security and real endgame Sustainability.
But we currently have this money trapped in the casino of Corporate Finance.
How can social media facilitate individual participation in local community engagement in globally curated conversations to upgrade our common sense of what this BIG MONEY really can and should be doing to finance a better future for all?