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.