Building a New Model that Makes the Current One Obsolete
Brief notes from the first PublicSpaces Conference
It has been a year that many people are joining conferences, courses, and concerts from their couch. The safety regulations — i.e., stay at home, cover the face with the mask, and social (physical) distancing — to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic have changed our social life. As citizens, we can be less (than pre-COVID 19 eras) found in public places; universities, public sector offices, parks, museums, and cultural sites are only some examples. Although the discussion around digital public spaces and value-based technology is nothing new, the COVID-19 crisis has fueled the debate. Many of the alternative options of the above public places/institutions/services that we have started to use — somehow — since the beginning of the pandemic originated in the private sector. They do not necessarily represent public interests and values. Therefore, the importance of rethinking the dynamics of development, governance, and market of the digital sphere has been growing and requires different stakeholders to contribute to the new settings collectively.
On the 11th and 12th of March 2021, I participated in an online conference that actually asked the participants, moments after its start, to move to another platform more aligned with offering public value-based features — i.e., transparency and privacy. It was the first conference of PublicSpaces. What could be a better start to the discussion — European alternatives in the digital sphere and bridging the gap between these public organizations and open source developers — than asking participants to use another platform. As PublicSpaces itself is a coalition of several stakeholders from the art sector to public media and technology development, the conference observed the participation of different research groups or civic society actors in the discussion either in panels or within the chat.
The conference was particularly interesting for me since my research focuses on the development of a value-driven European content personalization system. In this piece, I only briefly explain the ideas discussed on the first day. During the first day, keynote speakers Katja Bego, Paul Keller, and Elli Pariser presented their ideas about digital public spaces and the alternatives for the current situation. It was then followed by a debate panel between Alexander Baratsits, Prof. Dr. Barbara Thomaß, Danny O’Brien, Ariadna Matas, Paul Tang, and Alek Tarkowski on the need for Shared Digital European Public Spaces.
To begin with, Bego — a senior researcher at Nesta — discussed inspecting the issues that one observes with the current digital space. She highlighted the importance of rethinking the digital space to empower the public by revising the current business models ruling the internet, the internet/platform governance system, and access to the data. Personally, I think, and it showed up itself in further discussions during the two days of the conference, that rethinking the business model is playing a significant role in this discussion, even in the way of conceiving the change for the other two root causes. No matter where technology development occurs, with an economy that tries to datafy citizens and manipulate their choices, we cannot expect the technology to embody public values. Instead, one should imagine new ways of engaging the public and coming up with new models and institutional innovation.
The critics toward the market-driven approach of technology development have also been delineated in Keller’s speech. He is the co-founder of the Open Future Foundation that focuses on the idea of shared digital Europe. To figure out the basis of building up a digital public infrastructure for Europe, Keller took a historical approach to visit how the European Union has viewed the digital environment since the early 2000s. The story started when information society was the common term to call the internet and its components and then moves to when the EU planned to use the internet and digital ecosystem as an arm to its so-called “European Single Market” by introducing “Digital Single Market” in 2014. As he elaborated, issues of cultural, societal, and political roots could have been disregarded in this sense, as glitches and problems had to be framed as market failures to make sense in the context of this merge. He then highlighted the shift in looking at the digital environment by the rise of GDPR, a vision for a shared digital Europe, and the new Acts evolving around shaping Europe’s Digital Future. The shift empowers the approaches and practices that motivate infrastructure decentralization, different forms of public collaboration, and public institutions and sets new ways of governing digital spaces by European values.
Twisting the historical approach that Keller used, Pariser from Civic Signals argued that for a public digital space, we should look back at the meaning and influence of public physical spaces –i.e., parks — and figure out the essence of social values that they represent. This back-and-forth movement between physical and digital requires the designer to shift from the general idea of “user-friendly design” to “public-friendly design,” as Pariser argues. He focuses on quality public experiences rather than optimization for the market. Though his talk may seem to mainly focus on design concepts behind the public (digital) spaces, constructing a safe and inviting space for people to participate, build connections and act together, revokes concerns of new public institutions, governance systems, and policy-making, which have already mentioned above.
Particular to my interest, these three lines of argumentation seem crucial when it comes to design a value-based public service media. Many PSMs across Europe have already developed and implemented recommender systems on their online platforms. Nevertheless, how does the basic recommender algorithm — like collaborative filtering — empower these platforms as public digital spaces? As Bego discussed, developing giant platforms and actors within Europe does not necessarily mean that these new developments are value-based. How does a PSM design and implement a non-market-driven algorithm? What can we learn from the previous development in public broadcasting regarding its extension to platformization? How would be the inclusive regulatory/legal framework function influentially on the Member-State and European Union level? What does a public-friendly design mean in the time that algorithmic individualization is surging?
The same topics also followed up in the discussion within the debate panel “on the need for a Shared Digital European Public Spaces.” Unanimously, the panel participants agreed on how the giant American and Chinese technology companies' market approaches are shaping the current direction within the digital sphere. They also recognized the need for an alternative European coalition of different stakeholders to address technical infrastructure construction, policy-making and lobbying, strengthening public institutions, and public value-based development. It seemed that the force to address these concerns passes from both breaking up the current model and regulating the status quo.
As discussed in the panel, an alternative is not precisely about building up a new system but configuring the way to interconnect the existent smaller service providers and incentivize interoperable functionality. It can work perfectly by empowering public institutions as their structure has been set to comply with the public remit and understand how to offer features like content personalization out of the context of market-benefit-maximization. It is about bringing civic society and public forces to the discussion and supporting initiatives empowering the digitalization of public content.
After all, setting regulations which value privacy, transparency, and democratic control of the internet limit the big-tech access to the user data flow and fight against the environment of data surveillance and manipulation that they are based on. The last discussed step is a prerequisite for any form of alternative media infrastructure. Though these concerns and solutions are legit, one should never forget to include technical challenges regarding building up such systems in the discussion and dig a bit deeper into the characteristics of software/hardware culture that support such concerns to uncover tensions.
