Page 404 - Mike Ratner CC - WISR Complete Dissertation - v6

Civic Lessons in the Public Sphere

Gathering in the public sphere for dialogue and discourse about social issues of broad local

concern requires a level of dedication and commitment that has become a rarity. Many community

organizations focus on the needs or deficits of the community. Every community has needs and

deficits that ought to be attended to. But we have seen in study it is also possible to focus on assets

and strengths -- emphasizing what the community does have, not what it doesn't. Those assets and

strengths can be used to meet those same community needs; they can improve community life. To

draw upon a community's assets, one first has to find out what they are. Community Conversations

can help localities focus on identifying community assets and resources where they can be

harnessed to meet community needs and to strengthen the community as a whole.

New technology and social media sites are constantly changing, evolving and developing,

which means the face of personal communication is also changing. These changes often mean

people are having less and less face-to-face interaction. Email, texting, Facebook and Twitter are

just a few examples of mediums that have diminished verbal communication. Verbal

communication has decreased dramatically from just two decades ago, when most of the

technology used today did not even exist. Email was one of the first forms of communication

technology to come about that is still used today, starting during the ’70s but not becoming popular

until the ’90s. Email is currently the most popular form of online communication, even after

discounting the large volume of spam messages sent. According to readwrite.com, about 188

billion emails are sent out per day. In addition, there are three times as many email accounts as

Twitter and Facebook accounts combined. Internet and other technology-based forms of

communication give people the sense that they are in a dialogue, made possible through the use of

popular communication platforms such as Gmail, Snapchat, Facebook, and Twitter, to name a few,

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