from the convivial society https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/when-the-timeline-becomes-our-sidewalk
These contacts are mostly with people who are not necessarily part of our circle of friends, but who, because of these contacts, become something more than mere strangers. And that seems like a crucial, often ignored category because it informs, as Jacobs recognizes, whatever vague understanding we have of the public writ large… At stake, in her view, is nothing less than the trust that is essential to any functioning civic body.
“The trust of a city street,” she writes, “is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts. It grows out of people stopping by at the bar for a beer, getting advice from the grocer and giving advice to the newsstand man, comparing opinions with other customers at the bakery and nodding hello to the two boys drinking pop on the stoop ….”
is a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in time of personal or neighborhood need.”
very related to the thing im trying to capture with transactional intimacy and perception. We need micro interactions. It’s like micro marriages but with everyone to form a health society.
On this score, I’m particularly struck by the degree to which we are encouraged to displace or outsource the sort of micro-interactions, which generate the human contacts Jacobs finds so valuable. Sometimes this is a matter of unintended consequences; sometimes it is a matter of intentional design and expressed preferences.
- GPS
- self-checkout
- online banking
- home delivery
How can we replace these repeated micro interactions in the digital world? Can we have something like waypoints to encourage that sort of casual, shared public space with people who are in this special category (co-citizens? co-inhabitants? co-public?).
Characteristics of the interactions
- micro, low-pressure, happen naturally in the course of your normal life
- repeated with the same people
- in a public, accessible space
However, when we lack such contacts, when our experience of others too readily divides into friends and strangers, then our image of the public tends toward abstraction, a blank screen onto which it may be tempting to project our fears, suspicions, and prejudices or, perhaps more benignly and naively, our own values and assumptions. But the situation seems to be a bit worse than that. It’s not just that we lack the sidewalk as Jacobs experienced it, or some similar public space, and are thus left with a wholly inchoate image of the public beyond our affinity groups. It is, rather, that our digital media feeds and timelines have become our sidewalk, our trivial and incidental contacts, very different indeed from those Jacobs observed, transpire on digital platforms. This has turned out to be, how shall we say, a suboptimal state of affairs.
In short, our most public digital sidewalks tend toward open hostility, rancor, and strife. Little wonder then that so many are fleeing to what what might think of as the digital suburbs, relatively closed, private, and sometimes paywalled spaces we share with our friends and the generally like-minded. But I suspect this will do little for the public sphere that we will still share with those who remain outside of our circles, be they digital or analog, and who do not share our values and assumptions.
Our digital environments have forced us to embrace private spheres, but that shouldn’t be the norm. It’s unhealthy for that to be the norm in fact.
- Try experiment of rejecting all the ways technology is preventing us from having face-to-face with someone. experiments