Sam Liebeskind
@samliebeskind
product strategy at New_Public; previously community & growth @ Geneva
Sam Liebeskind
First, identity authentication can ensure that everyone on the platform is a human entitled to join the platform...no bots, and maybe no commercial companies. It used to be that knowing someone’s identity was necessary to ensure that they had rights to participate. But much of the toxicity of current social media interactions is about identities as... See more
Alex Pentland • Rediscovering the Pleasures of Pluralism: The Potential of Digitally Mediated Civic Participation — Digitalist Papers
The platform also gives participants a sample of comments to agree or disagree with. Unlike other platforms, users cannot reply to other users’ comments, making it difficult to engage in trolling. The process of looking at a range of comments made by others for upvoting and downvoting exposes people to others’ opinions, which has been shown to... See more
Alex Pentland • Rediscovering the Pleasures of Pluralism: The Potential of Digitally Mediated Civic Participation — Digitalist Papers
“This highlights that while Mead and Nelson were right to believe democracy depends on the pluralism that social media has encouraged, current platforms have missed that it also depends on communities achieving coherence and common understanding that empower effective social action, the formation of cultures of belonging, etc.” - Weil & Tang
Social media has evolved from text to photo to video to streams of text, photo, and video, and finally, it seems to have reached a kind of settled end state, in which TikTok and Meta are trying to become the same thing: a screen showing hours and hours of video made by people we don’t know. Social media has turned into television.
Everything Is Television
Craig Newmark of Craigslist Has a New Mission: Saving Democracy
Alexandra Tremayne-Pengellyobserver.com
Future of Trust and All about social networks
“I was taught that a trustworthy press is the immune system of democracy,” he said. “I could see an immune system not working, and I decided I needed to play a role.” He reached out to industry leaders like Jeff Jarvis to figure out what that role could look like. Newmark was particularly interested in how to regain public trust and fend off disinformation through good journalism, according to Jarvis, a professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism. “‘Trust is the new black’ was one of his lines,” he told Observer.”
However, most of these experiments have been failures. The trouble is that most of these platforms cannot keep the attention of the people who are supposed to use them. Too few of the platforms are designed to make online engagement compelling. So, figuring out how to make online engagement in government fun is actually a serious question for... See more
In Online Democracy, Fun Is Imperative
What are the practices and mindsets that can be helpful to navigate loss, grief, change and transitions? And what does it mean to make good compost as we close ideas, forms, collective creations that no longer serve us?
What Are the Practices and Mindsets That Can Be Helpful to Navigate Loss, Grief, Change and Transitions? And What Does It Mean to Make Good Compost as We Close Ideas, Forms, Collective Creations That No Longer Serve Us?
“composting” ideas
A great story about simplicity from Akio Morita, the instigator of the Walkman project at Sony:
Engineers had the technology to add the recording function to the Walkman and it would’ve cost only 50 cents to a dollar per unit. Morita decided against it. He wanted the device to have one function, which it performs very well. Walkman should only play