What Does Public Space Do?

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

"What does public space do? What separates healthy spaces from unhealthy spaces, both in the physical world and on line?" "We're going to talk about kind of safety and security. It is critical for people to feel safe in order to speak," she says. "And we've got some brilliant political scientists and designers and futurists who are going to kind of set that conversation in motion." 'Hopefully this can be a place where folks like that meet each other or get inspired and start building something totally'

You’ve heard us talk before on this podcast about the pitfalls of trying to moderate a “global public square.” Our guest today, Eli Pariser, co-director of Civic Signals, co-founder of Avaaz, and author of "The Filter Bubble," has been thinking for years about how to create more functional online spaces and is bringing people together to solve that problem. He believes the answer lies in creating spaces and groups intentionally, with the same kinds of skilled support and infrastructure that we would enlist in the physical world. It’s not enough to expect the big revenue-oriented tech companies to transform their tools into something less harmful; Eli is encouraging us to proactively gather in our own spaces, optimized for togetherness and cooperation.