Digital Placemaking

Gradients of intimacy and creating shelter: An interview with Erin Kissane

How might we use nature as an inspiration for creating online communities?

When the Internet Was a Place - Front Porch Republic

Not too long ago, the internet was a place you visited. The family desktop sat in its designated closet or back office. In schools, there were rooms filled with computers blinking in tandem, waiting for your class to arrive and hop online. You had to purposefully arrive at the internet, and when done, you left […]

Law and Borders - the Rise of Law in Cyberspace

Global computer-based communications cut across territorial borders, creating a new realm of human activity and undermining the feasibility--and legitimacy--of

AI and the future of digital public squares

Two substantial technological advances have reshaped the public square in recent decades: first, the advent of the internet and second, the recent introduction of large language models (LLMs). LLMs offer opportunities to reimagine and redesign more decentralized, participatory online spaces that can be used to facilitate deliberative dialogues at scale, but LLMs without proper governance can also exacerbate societal schisms. Here, we explore four applications of LLMs to improve digital public squares: collective dialogue systems, bridging systems, community moderation, and proof-of-humanity systems. Building on the input from over 70 civil society experts and technologists, we argue that LLMs both afford promising opportunities to shift the paradigm for conversations at scale and pose distinct risks for digital public squares. Given that people are shaped through their interactions in public squares, there is an important opportunity to build individual capacities and collective cohesion by transforming these digital public spaces. We lay out an agenda for future research and investments in AI that will strengthen digital public squares and safeguard against potential misuses of AI.

Ambient Co-presence

Creating a subtle, peripheral, and synchronous sense of shared space and context on the web

Urp: a luminous-tangible workbench for urban planning and design

In recent years, virtual reality technology has gradually attracted widespread attention from the society, because virtual reality technology could produce many scenes that humans cannot experience personally, such as diving into the deep sea or into ...

The Death of DeviantArt and the art-site shaped hole haunting the Internet - Multi-hyphenate

Why every new "Art Community" fails. Equal parts eulogy, condemnation, and mourning.

Building Digital Public Parks with Deepti Doshi

Designed for trust and connection, not ad clicks and outrage

Thoughts on Cyberpositionality: The Construction of Digital Communities in Digital Spaces, Damien Patrick Williams

I found Rebecca Monteleone, Martin Perez Comisso, and Elma Hajric’s “Cyberpositionality: Sociotechnical Location in the Digital Age” (2024) to be an extremely timely and important article which can…

All Our Selves In One Basket

They say you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket. Are we doing that with our communities?

The Internet has no benches

The case for internet neighborhoods we can hang out in.

Desire Paths for Wikipedia

An extension that remembers the path of a cursor over the linked pages of Wikipedia, “wearing” them into the page.

A City Is Not a Computer

This seems an obvious truth, but we need to say it loud and clear. Urban intelligence is more than information processing.

Defining the Dimensions of the “Space” of Computing

The first computing machines were so large they filled entire rooms. Today they are ubiquitous, built invisibly into our environments. While it's tempting to view this change within a predetermined space of progress, we can still shape the future on our own terms.

Every webpage deserves to be a place

Posted on Thursday 5 Sep 2024. 1,133 words, 5 links. By Matt Webb.