The 20th Century was the epoch of mass production, mass communication, and mass movements. But ours is the era of collaborative production and interactive media. What are the new forms of public assembly when organizing cannot be separated from the organization of the digital interface?
Socio-technologies of Assembly: Sense-making and Demonstration in Rebuilding Lower Manhattan
Drawing on Science and Technology Studies, Monique Girard and I propose that forms of public assemby vary as distinct combinations of social networks, technologies, and protocols. The key technologies of a public hearing, for example, are a microphone and a stopwatch, combined with rules for who can speak and for how long.
Governance and Information: The Rewiring of Governing and Deliberation in the 21st Century. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Socio-technologies of Assembly: Sense-making and Demonstration in Rebuilding Lower Manhattan
This PowerPoint augments the argument that Monique Girard and I make in our published paper, presenting more visual materials about the diverse forms of public assembly in which New Yorkers imagined the possibilities of urban space at and around the World Trade Center site.
Rooted Transnational Publics: Integrating Foreign Ties and Civic Activism
In the literature on globalization there is a widespread belief that civic associations with transnational ties are uprooted from their domestic societies. Laszlo Bruszt, Balazs Vedres, and I contend that there is not a forced choice between foreign ties and domestic integration. In fact, we find that transnational organizations are more domestically integrated than those without such ties. We base our argument on a survey of 1,002 of the largest civic organizations which we conducted in Hungary. We specify several forms of domestic integration and several forms of transnational ties. By demonstrating a systematic relationship between the patterns of foreign ties and the patterns of domestic integration, we chart three emerging forms of transnational publics.
Theory and Society 2006 35(3):323-349.
David Stark 