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!
Seems like multi-dimensional means something like using an "integrated lens" in this context? As opposed to something like the Spider-verse — which is also pretty exciting. –Josh
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.
Yeah! This has been a dream for decades now, but it's interesting to see it evolve through things like Kickstarter, Patreon, and now who knows going forward? –Josh
I mean, I agree, those are great from a platform perspective, but individual files could be kicking payments back to artists directly. It could be built into the file format. In fact I think it would have affected online culture if sharing creative work had cost a few cents, like a stream, from the beginning. I have millions of shares of my work on Facebook, for example, a site I don't use and that doesn't implement image search (of course) so my agency can't follow up on usages. This I think was perceived to increase "friction," and also we were told micropayments were too hard. Now, they're not hard at all. And I think many people who use and share creative work would be delighted to pay the people who make it as a seamless part of sharing/embedding/etc.
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.
Sure, I may have the following pseudo-identities: 1) comments on a local project's plans, 2) a hobbyist board and 3) an online poker tournament where I use a gamer tag to obfuscate who I am. I don't expect 2 or 3 to impact the reputation with 1. When they are combined in some way I don't expect or want it feels like a privacy violation.
This could also be an issue when you talk about photos from each group co-mingling with other photos. 1 may be my legal identity which if exposed in 3 could be considered doxing.
Ah, thanks, that makes a lot of sense, and is applicable to the physical public space metaphor we often use as well: When you're in a public park, you're often just "a guy in a park" to strangers you meet there until you chose to go beyond that by introducing yourself. –Josh
Yes! And this is why Contextual Integrity is such a great theory to consider. It is totally fine when other people are just walking around that I only expect them to be able to see (and maybe recognize me). Once you put facial recognition on a CCTV and broadcast the identities worldwide that is a violation of what I expect (aka a legitimate norm) about the situation.
I've often been frustrated at how some major social media platforms don't just cause identity collapse incidentally, but seem to push it as the only possible way for the Internet to work. This despite the fact that there's so much technical ability to choose exactly how your identity is known on the Internet. If I register a domain with a registrar that will cloak WHOIS information, and post a public key on an HTTPS page under that domain, I can write a message anywhere, with a signature and a link back to that page, and readers can be sure the message was from "me" without knowing anything about who I am other than the other messages I've sent linking to that same page. What freedom! And I could have as many such pages as I want. But that's not how the social internet is currently used, most of the time.
I really like the term you used "identity collapse." It is like most people are very complex, constantly renegotiated sets of identities. When we are forced to be just one in a context that is trying to be your one true identity we get a lot of friction, weirdness, and privacy concerns.
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.
I might have lost the plot a little and missed the last part of the prompt. To me, with better understanding of protocols, we could see many uses in public spaces. Better instant messaging protocols would mean people could bring their own clients, so they could customize chat spaces further, aiding in accessibility and personalization. Better social media protocols could support group blocklists, moderation teams, and experimental community management not bounded by what Substack, Twitter, and so on have time or inclination to develop. As mentioned below, better micropayment protocols could make it easier for artists to get compensated (without going through a third party like Kickstarter, or attaching to a flawed, fadish decentralized system I will not name)
I find this interesting. The idea of communal work toward progress for society versus just trying to make the biggest buck/trying to prevent loss of customers to the detriment of the humans using the tech. This might be interesting to look at in the lens of medical industry. So many doctors/platforms/hospitals are barred from communicating each other easily which translates to a loss of time and burden on the Medicare/insurance system and the patient’s well-being.
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.
Totally agree that this is a concept we should all know more about. There are arguments that companies should pay for the ways that they use our data given that they make so much money from selling it and other arguments that everyone should be able to remain anonymous on the internet until they choose not to. As a non-technical person, it’s hard to understand how any recommendations around this issue might work in practice.
I believe both of those conversations (pay for your data and privacy/anonymity) stem from the problem that our digital selves are not nearly as protected as our physical selves. The Web Foundation has a great start with their "Digital Bill of Rights" and I believe the EFF has something similar but without enforcement it's more a guiding principle than actual consumer protection.
Using things like Nextcloud to host your own data, Protonmail to prevent spying on your email and Home Assistant to replace Alexa or Google smart home are where I tell people to start to increase their data autonomy. Most of these projects have good documentation on how to install but still not as easy to use as an Echo (yet).
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!
I think a few brand agencies are pivoting this way. Designing communities, including online ones like https://floxstudio.com/
What about "multi-dimensional infrastructure" as described here? https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/a-vision-for-multidimensional-infrastructure/
Seems like multi-dimensional means something like using an "integrated lens" in this context? As opposed to something like the Spider-verse — which is also pretty exciting. –Josh
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.
Yeah! This has been a dream for decades now, but it's interesting to see it evolve through things like Kickstarter, Patreon, and now who knows going forward? –Josh
I mean, I agree, those are great from a platform perspective, but individual files could be kicking payments back to artists directly. It could be built into the file format. In fact I think it would have affected online culture if sharing creative work had cost a few cents, like a stream, from the beginning. I have millions of shares of my work on Facebook, for example, a site I don't use and that doesn't implement image search (of course) so my agency can't follow up on usages. This I think was perceived to increase "friction," and also we were told micropayments were too hard. Now, they're not hard at all. And I think many people who use and share creative work would be delighted to pay the people who make it as a seamless part of sharing/embedding/etc.
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.
Thanks! Help us out with a practical example of how what you're talking about might play out in someone's life? –Josh
Sure, I may have the following pseudo-identities: 1) comments on a local project's plans, 2) a hobbyist board and 3) an online poker tournament where I use a gamer tag to obfuscate who I am. I don't expect 2 or 3 to impact the reputation with 1. When they are combined in some way I don't expect or want it feels like a privacy violation.
This could also be an issue when you talk about photos from each group co-mingling with other photos. 1 may be my legal identity which if exposed in 3 could be considered doxing.
Ah, thanks, that makes a lot of sense, and is applicable to the physical public space metaphor we often use as well: When you're in a public park, you're often just "a guy in a park" to strangers you meet there until you chose to go beyond that by introducing yourself. –Josh
Yes! And this is why Contextual Integrity is such a great theory to consider. It is totally fine when other people are just walking around that I only expect them to be able to see (and maybe recognize me). Once you put facial recognition on a CCTV and broadcast the identities worldwide that is a violation of what I expect (aka a legitimate norm) about the situation.
I've often been frustrated at how some major social media platforms don't just cause identity collapse incidentally, but seem to push it as the only possible way for the Internet to work. This despite the fact that there's so much technical ability to choose exactly how your identity is known on the Internet. If I register a domain with a registrar that will cloak WHOIS information, and post a public key on an HTTPS page under that domain, I can write a message anywhere, with a signature and a link back to that page, and readers can be sure the message was from "me" without knowing anything about who I am other than the other messages I've sent linking to that same page. What freedom! And I could have as many such pages as I want. But that's not how the social internet is currently used, most of the time.
I really like the term you used "identity collapse." It is like most people are very complex, constantly renegotiated sets of identities. When we are forced to be just one in a context that is trying to be your one true identity we get a lot of friction, weirdness, and privacy concerns.
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.
I might have lost the plot a little and missed the last part of the prompt. To me, with better understanding of protocols, we could see many uses in public spaces. Better instant messaging protocols would mean people could bring their own clients, so they could customize chat spaces further, aiding in accessibility and personalization. Better social media protocols could support group blocklists, moderation teams, and experimental community management not bounded by what Substack, Twitter, and so on have time or inclination to develop. As mentioned below, better micropayment protocols could make it easier for artists to get compensated (without going through a third party like Kickstarter, or attaching to a flawed, fadish decentralized system I will not name)
I find this interesting. The idea of communal work toward progress for society versus just trying to make the biggest buck/trying to prevent loss of customers to the detriment of the humans using the tech. This might be interesting to look at in the lens of medical industry. So many doctors/platforms/hospitals are barred from communicating each other easily which translates to a loss of time and burden on the Medicare/insurance system and the patient’s well-being.
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.
Totally agree that this is a concept we should all know more about. There are arguments that companies should pay for the ways that they use our data given that they make so much money from selling it and other arguments that everyone should be able to remain anonymous on the internet until they choose not to. As a non-technical person, it’s hard to understand how any recommendations around this issue might work in practice.
I believe both of those conversations (pay for your data and privacy/anonymity) stem from the problem that our digital selves are not nearly as protected as our physical selves. The Web Foundation has a great start with their "Digital Bill of Rights" and I believe the EFF has something similar but without enforcement it's more a guiding principle than actual consumer protection.
Using things like Nextcloud to host your own data, Protonmail to prevent spying on your email and Home Assistant to replace Alexa or Google smart home are where I tell people to start to increase their data autonomy. Most of these projects have good documentation on how to install but still not as easy to use as an Echo (yet).
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?