Re:filtered #9: Tangible media experiences

Welcome to the 9th edition of my monthly newsletter on civic media opportunities in this moment of systemic disruption. This month's edition is an exploration of physical publishing experiments, and opportunities for disruption.

If this newsletter has been forwarded to you, consider subscribing. It's free. If you enjoy the read, you can buy me a coffee. You can also just let me know. It makes my day.

I took this photo nearly two decades ago while waiting for the subway some 110 meters under the city of Pyongyang. The experience felt like time travel: wooden seats, no LED lights, and Kim Jong Il's portraits (back then) above every carriage door.

At the time, North Korea still had surreally repressive rules on mobile phones. Most North Koreans didn't have one. Mine was in a bag that was sealed on arrival and unsealed upon departure. To pass the time, some of my fellow commuters read spreads of newspapers hung as posters in the middle of the platform.

I was reminded of this experience of idle newspaper reading this month in a conversation on the News Product Alliance Slack on media consumption in public spaces.

It made me wonder, especially in such a closed, controlled environment like Pyongyang:

• What are people reading these papers thinking?
• What do they choose as "news" to discuss at their dinner tables?
• How could this be disrupted?

I experienced one form of disruption a few years later on a ferry across the Lancang River, which is what the Mekong is called in China before it reaches the Burmese border.

With religious groups thriving in this border region but subject to strict controls and no licit ways to spread their messages, one Christian group had found an ingenious way of spreading its message: bank notes.

Cash was still king in China back then. The group had stamped their messages in red ink on one-yuan notes, including a phone number and website link.

Counterintuitively, this makes business sense: Banknotes are leaflets few would toss away, and would in all likelihood rush to pass on, further circulating the message. I too got a note as change for my ticket, and passed it on to someone else when I had the chance.

The cost per view for a one yuan note is only as high as one yuan (US$0.14) if the note reaches just one person. But if a typical one-yuan note reaches the same number of people as a typical US$1 note reaches in a year (110), then the cost per view is just US$0.0013. 

That's way cheaper than, say, a typical YouTube cost per view, which ranges between $0.10 to $0.30. And it doesn’t require any approval process.

The practice of using banknotes for messaging has tradition in China. Even the Central Reserve Bank, under Japanese occupation in the 1940s, issued cryptic messages on its bank notes, such as the letters C, G, W, R, and S scattered discreetly on banknotes, meant to read "Central Government Will Return Soon."

It isn't unique to China. In Russia, opposition activists have used banknotes to spread anti-government messages. In Venezuela, people have used devalued currency as a canvas for art and political statements due to hyperinflation. During the Troubles in Northern Ireland, both Republican and Loyalist groups would sometimes mark banknotes with their slogans.

So here's a thought: What if we viewed physical spaces and experiences not as afterthoughts or nice-to-have extras, but as prime opportunities for civic media disruption? With the right technology, we could make some clever moves in this arena.

The timing is good. We're seeing a growing number of media ventures experimenting, from pamphlets to picnics, as means of practicing journalism at a time when social media distribution becomes more fragmented and search traffic is being disrupted by generative AI.

It's as if we're rediscovering the power of tangible interactions in our digital age, opening up exciting possibilities for connecting with people and sharing information.

There is really exciting experimentation happening. I learned about a few such experiments in a chat with Stephen Jefferson on the NPA Slack this month that prompted me to discard/postpone earlier newsletter plans and share these ideas with you.

Thank you, Stephen!

Meet Soofa, an MIT Media Lab spin-off that has upgraded the humble park bench to a hub for community information: solar-powered "smart benches" provide seating and phone charging capabilities. They also feature e-ink displays that show local news, events, and announcements.

Hello Lamp Post, out of London, places QR codes on objects like lamp posts, mailboxes, or bus stops, allowing passersby to "chat" with these objects via their smartphones. Users can access community information, share their thoughts, or learn about local history.

In Manchester, the Otherworld project experimented with Bluetooth to create location-based information sharing. By placing beacons around the city, they can push content to nearby smartphones. This method allows for hyper-local, context-specific information delivery without requiring users to actively seek out the information.

In San Francisco, a group of volunteers is working to design, build, and install digital neighborhood bulletin boards in high-traffic areas across the city, with a focus on low-income neighborhoods. Content-wise, the boards could feature local news, upcoming events, lost pet notices, and even profiles of neighborhood cats and dogs.

The project seeks to fill the void left by the loss of physical spaces for local news. The team is currently in the prototyping and community feedback stage, check out their creative designs, ranging from wooden to fluffy structures.

This idea of reclaiming public spaces for community expression stands in stark contrast to how we currently experience many commercial media spaces in urban areas; just take the typical often boring and sometimes annoying out-of-home (OOH) advertising platforms that are so ripe to being (re)claimed. 

There's a lesson for journalism:

We have to stop playing the same tired tune that is trying to get people to pay attention to something someone else benefits from (the individual journalist, newsroom, funder, advertiser, government), and root the content supply efforts in the journalism superpowers of finding and delivering information that is useful for the viewer.

Just imagine those screens being actually good, or useful.

This may even be profitable: Take this study in Milan earlier this year (h/t Stephen) where tourists (admittedly a peculiar demographic) said they would be willing to pay an average of €4.35 more and travel 28 minutes longer if they could use a more attractive bus stop. That may feel like a stretch but even a tenth of that would be huge.

As we're constantly bombarded with digital information and attention spans dwindle, it's refreshing to see research that reminds us of the power of physical spaces and experiences. They matter – not just for aesthetics, but for community engagement, information sharing, and even civic participation.

A 2019 study by Dave Colangelo (h/t Stephen) explores how urban screens, LED façades, and public projections can transform cities into platforms for addressing critical societal issues. Colangelo calls this “media architecture” that bridges the gap between our physical and digital worlds, offering new ways to foster community participation and social critique.

One example is the #WeLiveHere2017 project in Sydney: Public housing residents used colorful LED lights in their windows to protest gentrification, turning their homes into a vibrant, collective statement.

This low-cost, community-driven action made their struggle visible and strengthened bonds among residents. It shows how creative use of technology in public spaces can amplify otherwise perhaps marginalized voices and create what Colangelo calls a "new monumentality" – one that reflects the dynamic experiences of residents rather than static, official narratives.

Autocrats have been claiming physical spaces for messaging since the beginning of time, just take this wall in Pyongyang:

That's a lot of messaging, none of it probably very useful.

The questions around “media architecture” are parallel to the key questions public media organizations and civic media broadly need to answer:

What are the information needs in this physical space and situation, and how do we meet them? How do we find and provide information to help people in this physical place become more informed, caring, and kind?

These examples are thrilling, especially if we think of them as opportunities to disrupt tightly controlled information spaces. What if physical spaces could be reclaimed for bottom-up information sharing, even in the Pyongyang subway or on a Mekong ferry?

Especially now, as Android phones are more pervasive in North Korea, I'm picturing QR codes that travel through stickers, and mesh networks in an area that pass content from one phone to another without crossing surveillance. These are the usual ideas, I'd love to learn about what else is out there.

All that is to say: We can, and should, reclaim tangible experiences for meaningful information sharing. The intersection of physical spaces and digital information presents exciting opportunities for civic engagement and community building.

Looking back

I'm heading back to New York City from the Global Gathering in Estoril, Portugal, where I facilitated two conversations among journalists, technologists, and digital rights activists: one on media strategy and one audience research.

We brainstormed how to keep independent media relevant and resilient, and I (re)connected with some wonderful people, including some readers of this newsletter.

There's general agreement: From the gradual fragmentation of the internet to shutdowns to donor fatigue, the current challenges require massive rethinking in how journalism is practiced.

But I was also reminded of how enamored (with the best intentions) we remain with the idea of content being of value per se, and how the good intentions of funders and technologists to support journalists in messaging can backfire into exacerbating our growing irrelevance.

To work on reversing this trend is why I started Gazzetta, and I'm glad these conversations are happening more and more. We will need to shift from a theory of change model of journalism to a theory of service model eventually.

More on this in the next newsletter. It will also include our audience research toolkit, which has been greatly expanded in Estoril. I need to filter and add all the relevant suggestions first.

I don't think I get to say this again, so I'll mention it here: I got to speak at the White House on my work on publicly-funded VPNs for censorship circumvention.

Making VPNs available to people is not as expensive as one would think: approx. seven US cents per user per month; i.e. it costs less than a dollar to enable a person to circumvent censorship and surveillance for an entire year.

Demand is massive and growing. Through the Open Technology Fund, the US currently supports more than 45 million monthly users in Iran, China, Russia, Myanmar and elsewhere, enabling their access to the open internet.

I am telling anyone who would listen that more people need to do more in this space, not just in terms of funding. There needs to be training people to use VPNs effectively, helping them identify trustworthy services, and building momentum to share and distribute access.

Looking ahead

In October, you'll also find me at the News Product Alliance Summit, where Becky Pallack and I will be facilitating a session on "Empathy without Exhaustion." We'll share some thoughts on lean strategies for audience research. I promise it won’t be exhausting. Tickets are available on the NPA site.

You'll also find Marguerite Meyer and me at the free, virtual Mental Health in Journalism Summit talking about the "hunter vs. farmer hypothesis" for ADHD.

I'll be in DC, Detroit and Taipei for workshops. If you're there or know anyone I should meet there, let me know. We may be doing a public event in Taipei in the first days of November, to be determined. If you're interested, let me know and I'll keep you posted. 

You can reach me by replying to this email, on Signal or by claiming a slot in my schedule.

If this newsletter has been forwarded to you, consider subscribing. It's totally free and will give you a monthly dose of reflection and inspiration on opportunities for civic media.

If you enjoyed the read, do let me know, or you can even buy me a coffee – copying this idea from Mike Tatarski's excellent Vietnam Weekly newsletter.

It's a bit of an experiment to see if anyone reading this would really be so kind as to support my caffeinated quests. Could this be you?