“Public” Space, Civic Engagement, and the Internet

Or what is public or private anymore anyway?

At the 2013 Civic Media Conference at MIT, Sue Gardner, then Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, described Wikipedia as one of the public parks or libraries of the Internet. She urged everyone in the room to think about how we have to work to protect public spaces online, in the same way that we do in our communities.

Mark Surman echoed this at his opening keynote for Mozilla Festival 2014. Parks, libraries, sidewalks, squares — these are the public places where we all have equal rights and access. We can use these spaces to relax, talk with friends, organize a group, or even gather for a protest.

These pieces of our “civic infrastructure” are an essential part of our environment, our culture, and our communities.

However, we lack parallel online options. The closest equivalent public forums/parks/squares are the Facebooks, Twitters, Nextdoors and some of the news outlets that provide us the pixels and bytes to converse over public and private matters. But these platforms are not community resources — not truly. While they offer us a feeling of community, most of these platforms are private spaces.

In some cases, this is a feature we like — we want to be able to have somewhere to share memories with friends and family. These online privately hosted semi-public spaces blur the already messy line between what is public and private. Unlike talking with a friend on a park bench, the social platforms where these conversations happen now own the information, photos, and exchanges that we have on them. Additionally, government agencies and officials are also meeting us in these private spaces.

Suddenly we are in a very complex environment for evaluating what our rights are. In these places, what we can and cannot do is governed by some combination of laws and terms of service. Admittedly, most people haven’t read every law, just as they haven’t read every terms of service they sign. What’s more, terms of service actually change all the time, without a clear path for our agency other than to walk away from using the service. As governments are joining in private online spaces, they are using their power to negotiate their own terms — what of their data the companies have access to, which of their interactions on social platforms count as interactions of record, for example. What are the implications for our rights as users, citizens and humans?

Social media platforms present a wealth of data to study and users with whom to experiment — what are the consequences of a company experiment to study human behavior? What rights are they held to? What happens when a government asks for our information because of something we said in this private/public feeling space? In a physical park, anything we say is gone after we say it — unless, of course, it’s recorded.

Recently a handful of artists, designers, researchers, activists, librarians, and mapping and Internet enthusiasts gathered to listen to Aaron Straup Cope talk about the origin story of the Internet and think about what community — online and off — means in 2014. There, in a house on an island, which is a public park (without Internet access or good cellular service for that matter) we found ourselves discussing community, networks, the evolution of communications and the Internet, privacy and human rights.

Underlying all these themes is a basic struggle to understand what community means now and at both local as well as Internet scale. How and can we, as a community, collectively curate safe public spaces that allow us the opportunity to define what we want community to be? Enough of us have agreed to support Wikipedia as our library — both in funding and in contributions to content, but where is the town square?

And whether we realize or not, our access to the library can be altered or taken away by our ISPs, our government, or any hacker/group of hackers who decides to attack it or us. Thus far we’ve been worried about using private platforms to create digital bulletin boards and neighborhood watches for our physical public spaces, but what is the equivalent for our digital public spaces?

To some extent, how we’ve come together around Net Neutrality is a version of this — fighting for openness of the Internet, so as to have the possibility of public space online. Although we don’t know exactly how that fight will shake out at least we know that people care enough to work together to steward online community and voice our opinions on the matter.