Hope for New Online Public Spaces with Talia Stroud and Eli Pariser

This week we’re joined by Talia Stroud, Director of the Center for Media Engagement at The University of Texas at Austin, and Eli Pariser, formerly of Upworthy and MoveOn and author of The Filter Bubble, to talk about their latest project, Civic Signals/New Public. After several rounds of conversation on “what’s wrong with social media and how can we fix it?” Talia and Eli started Civic Signals to try to fill the gap between necessary critiques of our current online spaces and creating digital environments that we want to inhabit. By looking across disciplines and off-line equivalents to our online spaces, they are working to create a community to collectively build an evolving design framework for online public spaces. Eli and Talia take us through their approach, methods, and findings so far – and how they’ve doubled down on this work in the pandemic. Finally, we go on a deep dive of the first of the four essential “building blocks” they’ve found that make digital spaces work for people across multiple lived experiences: Welcome.

A full transcript of this episode will be available on the episode page soon.

Here are some of the references from this episode, for those who want to dig a little deeper:

Wile. E. Coyote (Looney Tunes)

Contrasting figures in Urban Planning:
Robert Moses
Jane Jacobs

Civic Signals’ evolving New Public Framework

Some examples of clearly-articulated online community norms/terms of service:
Wikipedia
Archive of Our Own

Early thinking on establishing norms in online spaces: Julian Dibbell - A Rape in Cyberspace

A Pattern Language (1977 - “the intimacy gradient”)

A hyper-local online community: Front Porch Forum (Vermont)

Habermas – The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

More on Civic Signals:
New Public Festival, Jan 12-14, 2021
Learn more about the New Public community, subscribe to newsletter

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

The Social Dilemma (documentary)

Antitrust law and the “Ma Bell” breakup

Re-imagining Public Broadcasting - Newton Minow

Boy Scouts Radio community

Earlier online community - The Well

Check out these previous episodes we mentioned:
Episode 75: Play as a Precursor to Participation, with Reanne Estrada and Benjamin Stokes
Episode 45: “Radicalized” with Cory Doctorow
Episode 56: Exploring Virtual Communities with Howard Rheingold and Patricia G. Lange

Share your thoughts via Twitter with Henry, Colin and the How Do You Like It So Far? account! You can also email us at [email protected].

Music:
“In Time” by Dylan Emmett and “Spaceship” by Lesion X.
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In Time (Instrumental) by Dylan Emmet  https://soundcloud.com/dylanemmet
Spaceship by Lesion X https://soundcloud.com/lesionxbeats
Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0
Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/in-time-instrumental
Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/lesion-x-spaceship
Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/AzYoVrMLa1Q
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

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Share your thoughts via Twitter with Henry, Colin and the How Do You Like It So Far? account! You can also email us at [email protected].

Music:
“In Time” by Dylan Emmett and “Spaceship” by Lesion X.
In Time (Instrumental) by Dylan Emmet  https://soundcloud.com/dylanemmet
Spaceship by Lesion X https://soundcloud.com/lesionxbeats
Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0
Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/in-time-instrumental
Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/lesion-x-spaceship
Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/AzYoVrMLa1Q
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––