Sam Liebeskind
@samliebeskind
product partnerships at New_Public; previously community & growth @ Geneva
Sam Liebeskind
Neil Postman's questions to ask of a new technology:
What is the problem to which this technology is the solution?
Whose problem is it?
What new problems might result from solving this problem?
Which people and institutions might be harmed by this solution?... See more
James Madison — a.k.a. Guy Who Wrote the First Amendment — argued that newspapers should have a massive subsidy from the federal government to encourage the distribution of newspapers. The “postal subsidy,” which provided discounted mail, would be about $46 billion in today’s dollars — bigger than the NASA budget.
Steven Waldman • How high school sports coverage can save democracy - Poynter
Few serious observers can consider what we might call the “public square” platforms—particularly Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and the public square’s library, Google—a boon to democracy. Nor are they a flourishing intellectual marketplace. Although it is tempting to shrug at their problems by comparing them to the heated partisan newspapers of the... See more
Jon Askonas • Why Speech Platforms Can Never Escape Politics | National Affairs
All about social networks and Social Platform Trust & Safety
Putting aside the mechanics of algorithmic feeds, it feels like there’s often a mismatch between the international user base of a platform and the national “democracy” about which these points are being made
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
“Networks connect; communities care”
medium.com
Thriving places don’t have purposes and missions, but they’re not hostile to them. They are somewhere between benignly indifferent to mildly (but not over-eagerly) welcoming towards missionary energies. Think of storied city like New York or Rome or Bangkok. These are places that catalyze mission-driven activities of various sorts, but don’t... See more
Mission vs creating the conditions
A new paper on the risk of nationalist governance capture in self-governed Wikipedia projects
zarineblog.communitydata.science
Bristol Cable launches hybrid news and social networking app in bid to double membership
journalism.co.uk