Consumers have sensed this and are moving towards a digital social environment with smaller and more manageable spaces. You can see this in the rise of Discord, Slack, group chats, and Web3 DAOs — spaces that feel more possessable, manageable, and secure than legacy commerce platforms. However, these spaces tend to be high-quality, well-censored and homogenous, with a subscription-based or low-quality, heterogeneous business model that is free for all. The key project that the new wave of startups has little incentive to tackle is building free, heterogeneous, well-censored communities — and that’s where public service digital spaces come into play. important role.
Private and public funders should invest in smaller, manageable public spaces — digitally equivalent parks and libraries — built with specific community goals in mind. possible (for example: Local conversation is slower but respectful) rather than advertiser engagement.
As for what will attract people to join them, the dynamics of these new spaces can be informed by those in offline lives. People don’t go to libraries to participate in civic democracy, they go to libraries to get books, access the internet, engage librarians, and use free community spaces — in other words, to meet different individual needs that commercial and market solutions will not. The fact that libraries build community strength and cohesion is a beneficial byproduct. There are many unmet needs in digital life – especially when it comes to building deep relationships and community. Meeting needs around social support and connection in a simple, enjoyable way can promote acceptance of these spaces.
Some of these social spaces could also develop around existing public facilities. For example, New_ Public has been investigating how digital conversations in public service can be built around one of the largest and largest public institutions in the United States: school communities. These communities contain many ingredients for building a healthy, pluralistic, cross-cutting public conversation: shared identities and investments, relatively high levels of diversity, and the need for digital communication. However, as researcher danah boyd points out, schools are overcrowded, and weaving this “social network for democracy” is no one’s business. School community members in Oakland, California we worked with saw a Huge unmet opportunity to help each other solve problems as caregivers, be more informed about their school, and celebrate their child’s achievements digitally (think digital equivalent of a program) school talent)—one of which is met by most of the tools available around the school.
There’s still plenty of space in this vision for online private businesses, just as coffee shops don’t stop the need for parks, and bookstores don’t eliminate the need for libraries. In fact, as they do in the real world, investments in digital social infrastructure can get a raise business value and health: They can take on some functions and tough conversations that advertisers don’t want to support anyway and would be better managed by civil servants.
Bringing online a digital environment conducive to healthy and democratic conversation will require a combination of space-scale ambition and human-scale curiosity and interest. We’ll need an explosion of experimentation to discover how different types of social spaces are built, and we’ll need to develop new methods to quickly gauge what works and what doesn’t. We will need a significant amount of new charity and public funding for this work. And we will need community entrepreneurs, digital urban planners and public interest technologists who are adept at building with the public.
Getting our communications infrastructure right is a mission-critical existence. The fate of democracy — and our ability to solve big problems, from running AI to climate change to the next pandemic — depends on our ability to see each other, influence each other, and influence each other. each other and make sense to each other. All of that will happen to a large extent in the digital space.
We can build the kind of digital public space that really helps us come together effectively. Or we can continue to put our faith in Xi Jinping, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon and hope for the best.
We know how that test goes. Time to try another one.
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