Ethan Zuckerman offered the following yesterday…
My friends at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia have just published a new paper from me on the topic of digital public infrastructures. This is an idea I started talking about in an article for the Columbia Journalism Review late last year, and presented at a terrific conference called “The Tech Giants, Monopoly Power, and Public Discourse”.
His first two points in his summary map onto our thinking of Big Tech vs. Front Porch Forum…
““ Social media is often not very good for us as citizens in a democracy. That shouldn’t surprise us, as it wasn’t designed to be a space for civic discourse ““ it was designed to capture our attention and our personal data for use in targeting ads.
““ If we wanted media that was good for democratic societies, we’d need to build tools expressly designed for those goals.
And it gets better from there. Read the whole piece here.
Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum (FPF). My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006... read more