Pub­lic Cit­i­zens

At times, public do­main ren­ders it­self as a phys­ical en­vi­ron­ment— per­haps a park, or plaza. Con­cep­tu­ally, though, it has no ex­plicit point of ref­er­ence. The public do­main is built on events— the in­ti­mate ex­change of strangers. The French philoso­pher, Michel Fou­cault, im­plies in his text— Fear­less Speech— that the public do­main is the en­gage­ment of space and di­a­logue.¹

In the Athenian democ­racy of an­cient Greece, this was the stage— the "Pnyx"— upon which a par­rhe­si­ates— a "truth-teller"— could speak. Fou­cault de­scribes this act of truth-telling, par­rhesia, as a sa­cred right of the Greek cit­izen. This right is ex­er­cised with risk to the speak­er's own rep­u­ta­tion, per­haps against the will of au­thority— but it is com­mitted out of ne­ces­sity. The par­rhe­si­ates is com­pelled, de­spite the threat of defama­tion, not only to speak but to be heard— to en­gage the public do­main.

Artists and ac­tivists have acted as par­rhe­si­ates in the past, lending life to the public do­main. In Foley Fed­eral Plaza, Richard Serra cre­ated Tilted Arc which dis­rupted the space and spurred an in­tense de­bate on the role of the plaza and his sculp­ture. Public do­main flour­ished in Zuc­cotti Park, and other lo­cal­ized so­cial arenas across the world, when it amassed thou­sands of pro­testers during Oc­cupy Wall Street in 2011. Other forms of po­lit­ical oc­cu­pa­tion, such as those tac­tics em­ployed by Black Lives Matter, have even ap­pro­pri­ated streets and high­ways as public do­main— if only for a mo­ment.

In my opinion, this en­tan­gle­ment of the po­lit­ical act and the phys­ical space in which it un­furls drives a longing for iden­tity. By oc­cu­pying public do­main, the tra­di­tional con­cept of "cit­i­zen­ship" is dis­placed. In its stead, the public cit­izen takes on a new per­for­ma­tive role. The re­la­tion­ships which tra­di­tion­ally struc­ture so­cial be­havior be­come more fluid, and any or­ga­ni­za­tion within this en­vi­ron­ment is typ­i­cally dy­namic and rhi­zomatic. The willing dis­en­fran­chise­ment that oc­curs upon en­tering the public do­main gives the in­di­vidual the op­por­tu­nity to be heard out­side of their typ­ical role. How­ever, the role of the "place" in public do­main has grad­u­ally shifted.

Since the early 2000s, ac­tivism has in­creas­ingly in­hab­ited a vir­tual space— shoring up the brick-and-mortar move­ment with a dig­ital pres­ence on­line. Due to the in­ti­macy of public do­main, suc­cessful move­ments have al­ways re­lied on freedom of media. The ideas car­ried from the public do­main de­pend on their ability to in­fil­trate pop­ular media.² First paper, then radio, tele­vi­sion, and now the In­ternet, media mainly af­fords an op­por­tu­nity— to ex­pand the public do­main.

On­to­log­i­cally, media is quite unique. It si­mul­ta­ne­ously de­scribes in­for­ma­tion— the "con­tent"— as well as the plat­form used to com­mu­ni­cate that in­for­ma­tion (sports or news— radio or tele­vi­sion).³ You can only reach as long as your arm, and the arm of the media is vast— and as David Karpf em­pha­sizes, it is dy­namic. In the modern media economy, "street ac­tivism" can't get enough di­verse sup­port to gen­erate a pop­ular move­ment. The In­ternet has pro­vided an in­cred­ible media plat­form for growth and or­ga­ni­za­tion en masse. How­ever, as David elab­o­rates in An­a­lytic Ac­tivism: Dig­ital Lis­tening and the New Po­lit­ical Strategy (DLNPS), you have to know how to en­gage the In­ternet.⁴

Ac­cording to Hajer and Rei­jn­dorp's In Search of New Public Do­main: Analysis and Strategy, public do­main is... "those places where an ex­change be­tween dif­ferent so­cial groups is pos­sible and also ac­tu­ally oc­curs."⁵ While the In­ternet has af­forded ample op­por­tu­nity for such ex­change, if it is un­able man­i­fest across a hy­brid media ecology, then it will likely have little pur­pose in the ex­pan­sion of public do­main. As David Karpf ex­plains in DLNPS, the hy­brid media en­vi­ron­ment de­mands the en­gage­ment of a va­riety of plat­forms and tex­tures. There is a com­plex set of rules gov­erning the mech­a­nisms of in­for­ma­tion ecolo­gies, and it's no longer enough for ac­tivists to hand out pam­phlets, text their friends, or create a Face­book event:

Dig­ital ac­tivism in 2016 is dif­ferent from dig­ital ac­tivism in 2010 or 2004 be­cause the hy­brid media en­vi­ron­ment con­tinues to evolve.⁶

Karpf em­pha­sizes a strict pro­gram of what is es­sen­tially feed­back media— im­ple­menting the same clever an­a­lytics and al­go­rithmic testing com­monly de­ployed by com­mer­cial mar­keting firms. How­ever, in­stead of de­ploying these methods within the con­text of a pri­vate-sector en­ter­prise, Karpf stresses the adop­tion of these tech­niques by ac­tivist or­ga­ni­za­tions.

In­tel­lec­tuals and ac­tivists must em­brace new media tech­nology to re­main so­cially com­pet­i­tive, dy­nam­i­cally tuning po­lit­ical strate­gies with the con­stant ap­pli­ca­tion of user-re­in­forced data. The or­ga­ni­za­tional models of ac­tivist cam­paigns must com­pli­ment and aug­ment their street move­ment with an agile team of media tech­ni­cians and data an­a­lysts who are si­mul­ta­ne­ously ac­quiring con­tri­bu­tions in num­bers and cap­ital. Dou­glas Kellner, a dis­tin­guished pro­fessor at UCLA's Grad­uate School of Ed­u­ca­tion and In­for­ma­tion Studies— closely mir­roring Karpf's sen­ti­ments— di­rectly im­plores ac­tivists to adopt con­tem­po­rary prac­tices in media tech­nology:

ef­fec­tive use of tech­nology is es­sen­tial in con­tem­po­rary pol­i­tics and... in­tel­lec­tuals who wish to in­ter­vene in the new public spheres need to de­ploy new com­mu­ni­ca­tions media to par­tic­i­pate in de­mo­c­ratic de­bate and to shape the fu­ture of con­tem­po­rary so­ci­eties and cul­ture...

com­puters have pro­duced new public spheres and spaces for in­for­ma­tion, de­bate, and par­tic­i­pa­tion that con­tain both the po­ten­tial to in­vig­o­rate democ­racy and to in­crease the dis­sem­i­na­tion of crit­ical and pro­gres­sive ideas...

But par­tic­i­pa­tion in these new public spheres... re­quire[s] crit­ical in­tel­lec­tuals to gain new tech­nical skills and to master new tech­nolo­gies.⁷

In some sense, what both au­thors call for is the de­f­i­n­i­tion, and del­i­cate cu­ra­tion, of a dig­ital public do­main. In the past, de­signers and ar­chi­tects have pro­duced (per­haps, even un­in­ten­tion­ally) some in­cred­ible spaces ad­dressing the public do­main. Lina Bo Bardi's el­e­vated Mu­seum of Art in São Paulo, for ex­ample, pro­vides a space for phys­ical oc­cu­pa­tion and or­ga­ni­za­tion in its ar­tic­u­la­tion of the shaded plaza be­neath.

Cul­tural the­o­rists and philoso­phers like Fou­cault and Peter Slo­ter­dijk (men­tioned in the notes) have long stressed the per­ti­nence of public spheres— es­pe­cially as it man­i­fests within ar­chi­tec­tural space. Now, Karpf and Kellner have im­plored the "an­a­lytic ac­tivist" to de­fend the vir­tual ex­ten­sions of public do­main, citing the ne­ces­sity of tech­nical lit­er­ates to em­ploy proven an­a­lytic mar­keting strate­gies within novel ter­rains— out­side of the pri­vate sector. Kell­ner's call-to-ac­tion is a per­fect com­pli­ment to Karpf's elab­o­ra­tions on these pow­erful new methods which shape po­lit­ical move­ments, specif­i­cally the "in­sightful reading of the pre­sent media system."⁸

How­ever, keeping his words in check, Karpf makes a point of noting the po­ten­tial pit­falls of data an­a­lytics— both po­lit­i­cally and cul­tur­ally. An­a­lytic ac­tivism, he says, "re­quires strategic clarity, a healthy skep­ti­cism about where the data pro­vides a bi­ased pic­ture, and a sense of what the data cannot tell you."⁹ Tar­geted dig­ital media has— over time— re­vealed the ex­is­tence of what Karpf and others have called dig­ital "echo cham­bers". In ef­fect, this de­scribes the re­ver­ber­a­tion of like-minded news and con­tent within so­cial media.

Ac­cording to Karpf, the al­go­rithms used by Face­book and other so­cial plat­forms tailor their con­tent to serve more "agree­able" con­tent. More plainly, if you're a lib­eral de­mo­crat, your friends prob­ably aren't sharing right-wing news from In­foWars or Bre­it­bart. Un­like radio and broad­cast, you con­trol the ma­jority of most of your so­cial chan­nels on­line, leaving little ex­po­sure to op­po­si­tional con­tent— any news or opin­ions that sig­nif­i­cantly chal­lenge your world­view. Since a growing number of Amer­i­cans re­ceive their news through these fil­tered out­lets, they have in fact con­tributed to a sys­temic process of po­lar­iza­tion— specif­i­cally in re­la­tion to par­tisan pol­i­tics and the as­so­ci­ated so­cio­cul­tural ten­den­cies of each party:

While these tech­nolo­gies [so­cial net­works] have the po­ten­tial to ex­pose in­di­vid­uals to more di­verse view­points, they also have the po­ten­tial to limit ex­po­sure to at­ti­tude-chal­lenging in­for­ma­tion, which is as­so­ci­ated with adopting more ex­treme at­ti­tudes over time and mis­per­ceiving facts about cur­rent events.

This changing en­vi­ron­ment has led to spec­u­la­tion around the cre­ation of “echo cham­bers” (in which in­di­vid­uals are ex­posed only to in­for­ma­tion from like-minded in­di­vid­uals) and “filter bub­bles” (in which con­tent is se­lected by al­go­rithms based on a view­er’s pre­vious be­hav­iors), which are de­void of at­ti­tude-chal­lenging con­tent.¹⁰

If we imagine the dig­ital public do­main as a vir­tual plat­form for the ex­change of ideas— a "place of en­hanced im­prob­a­bil­i­ties", then dig­ital media is cer­tainly a cat­a­lyst and a vessel for vi­rality.¹¹ How­ever, most of the spaces that are sought out on­line are in the hands of pri­vate en­ter­prises. In­ternet ser­vice providers (ISPs) main­tain the vast in­fra­struc­ture of this in­for­ma­tion ecology; while media plat­forms (YouTube, Face­book, In­sta­gram, etc.) have dom­i­nantly func­tioned as its cu­ra­tors.¹²

The im­plicit role of these dif­ferent cor­po­ra­tions is to main­tain a steady ac­qui­si­tion of dig­ital con­tent, while sim­u­la­neously shaping its dis­tri­b­u­tion ac­cording to al­go­rith­mi­cally-driven per­cep­tions of user in­terest. How­ever, if we con­sider the failure of these plat­forms to ad­e­quately ex­pose us to a di­ver­sity of con­tent— and, more im­por­tantly, a di­verse au­di­ence en­abling fruitful dis­cus­sion— then we're ei­ther left stoking our con­fi­dence in bi­ased opin­ions or ne­glecting and con­demning the "other".

Moving for­ward, there is no doubt that pol­i­tics will con­tinue to in­cor­po­rate these in­ter­dis­ci­pli­nary prac­tices as their in­flu­ence pushes be­yond the pri­vate sector— hiring tech­nical teams with a shrewd un­der­standing of the pos­sible role emerging tech­nolo­gies will play in the coming races. The public cit­izen has an oblig­a­tion, now more than ever, to con­struct a more wholistic view of the po­lit­ical sphere— and to use that un­der­standing to con­nect with con­stituents out­side their cus­tomary cir­cles.

As the hy­brid media economy evolves and di­ver­si­fies, in­tel­lec­tuals and tech­nol­o­gists have an in­cred­ible op­por­tu­nity to con­nect their peers in unique and pow­erful ways. Ar­guably most dire is our need for new and in­no­v­a­tive dig­ital public spheres, un­fet­tered by pri­vate in­ter­ests or dis­torted by al­go­rithmic de­ci­sion-making. Es­pe­cially in the face of ram­pant mis­in­for­ma­tion and po­lar­iza­tion, this vir­tual public do­main is nec­es­sary for pro­moting dis­cus­sion and, hope­fully, res­o­lu­tion. Ad­di­tion­ally, I be­lieve com­mu­ni­ties need to de­velop free and in­clu­sive out­lets for sharing orig­inal, ac­count­able, and rel­e­vant media and news at a local level.