Pairwise Empathy: Socio-Structural Interventions for the Networked Public Sphere

The networked public sphere is today’s most active domain of public debate. Platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and a number of micro-spheres in the form of comment sections on news sites and blogs provide a platform unlike open societies have ever seen. Debate rages on the internet, thanks to significantly open exposure of ideas, and at least the potential of finding ideas far divergent from one’s own. There were hopes early on in the days of the internet that this would usher in a renewed form of deliberative democracy. Unfortunately there are a number of problems with the current form of discourse the internet gives rise to.

Given the right structures, social interaction can lead to perspectives that would not have been likely otherwise. I would argue that these structures have not arrived in the networked public sphere. Simply relying on the lower-level network architecture of the internet and the web in order to create the kind of productive deliberation that an open society needs to function is not enough. What I will describe here is one instantiation of novel structures for a social network, intended to increase respectful deliberation, relegating interactions to a more confined and guided space, trading some of the outright limitless architecture for one with norms encoded in it, so that conversations occur in a protected space and allow a pair of deliberators to hear one another clearly.

Full Paper Here

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