Hey, thanks for visiting our site. We’re Tali Blankfeld, Nara Kasbergen, Niel Bekker and Rachel Slaff, students in Clay Shirky’s Designing Conversational Spaces course in at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.
For our midterm assignment, our class was tasked with creating a conversational space centered on a specific piece of content. Our group decided to focus our work around something controversial. So often, online conversations based on contentious topics are overwhelmed by ugly insults and flame wars. Our aim is to circumvent these all-too-typical cruel and circuitous debates, and, instead, to encourage intellectual and civil conversation.
We chose to focus on politics in general because it affects all of us in some way. Consequently, we’d hope that everyone would have some kind of opinion or stance on the matter. Why did we choose to pin our site to President Obama’s 2008 campaign promises in particular? With the 2012 election approaching, we think it’s important for voters to reflect on his past term and to consider whether his presidency accomplished what we thought it might. Focusing on Obama is also crucial to our site being neutral turf for debate and discussion — regardless of your political affiliation, he’s your president. Put two Democrats in a room, and they’re as likely to have different viewpoints on Obama’s presidency as a Libertarian and an OWS member might.
Which brings us to the unique structure of our site — conversational enclosures. You’re locked into a discussion with another user on our site, so that you’re forced either to engage in a meaningful discussion, or to bow out. There isn’t a peanut gallery of support for rude comments here; 50 users can’t gang up on one person for having a different opinion. Our hope is that most users won’t be able to sling solely insults for an hour, that those who would typically become bullies in a political debate online might be forced to back up their opinions. In the short term, our goal is to force users from a variety of political creeds to develop civil discourse and to engage with each other.
Our intent is to encourage users both to analyze their government’s successes and shortcomings, and to broaden their political understanding before heading to the ballot box next year. Our hope is to create a space for conversation.
