In the 21st century, urban screens have become a ubiquitous component of contemporary city infrastructure, from the digital displays of Times Square to the billboards lining suburban highways. Despite their prevalence, however, they are most frequently employed as media for advertising. In recent years, though, urban screens have been employed as tools for civic engagement. For example, researchers from the Illinois Institute of Technology used interactive urban screens to engage Chicago residents in policy discussions (Forlano & Mathew, 2014), while researchers at Queensland University of Technology deployed public displays to collect feedback on proposed city improvements (Schroeter, 2012). I argue these screens could be taken one step further—as a means of contributing to global civil society.
Kaldor (2010) offers several definitions of civil society, including the activist version, which emphasizes active citizenship and self-organization outside of formal political circles. This may include grassroots organizations or more established non-governmental organizations, such as Greenpeace and Amnesty International. The activist version also depends on a global public sphere, a space that extends beyond any single state, where people can communicate openly about matters of common concern. What matters most in this space is non-instrumental communication: communication focused on personal expression and relationship-building rather than on achieving a predetermined end. Advertising, by contrast, is a textbook case of instrumental communication, aiming to persuade audiences effectively. Activists also seek to persuade, of course, but the distinction concerns the space itself: a global public sphere is useful to civil society only if it is not merely a channel for selling something or steering people toward a fixed outcome.
Two kinds of urban screens can support this form of civil society. Broadcast screens disseminate information, showing the same content to everyone nearby, and can deliver civic information directly to an audience without the barriers presented by algorithmic filtering. Interactive screens enable two-way participation, and can connect individual citizens both in person and online. A further step, from the local to the global, turns existing local uses into a contribution to global civil society.
Unlike personalized forms of digital media, a broadcast screen shows the same content to everyone who passes it, so no algorithm decides what an individual does or does not see. Any personalized technology carries with it these limitations—Dylko (2015) argues that personalization encourages selective exposure by filtering information according to user preferences. Social media is one such technology, which, as Rose-Stockwell (2023) argues, utilizes algorithms to spark outrage and keep users engaged. Using Kaldor’s language, broadcast screens support the activist version of civil society by creating shared public knowledge (2010).
Interactive screens are distinctive in connecting citizens in person and online at the same time: content submitted from a phone or computer appears on a screen in a physical place, so online contributors and passersby share one visible space. Churchill and Nelson’s (2007) “eyeCanvas” displayed drawings submitted online, which in turn encouraged social interaction and the contribution of additional drawings in a San Francisco cafe. In this instance, screens were deployed to collect playful, artistic contributions from both in-person and online users, who were then encouraged to continue adding to each other’s work. Morrison et al.’s (2008) “CityWall” similarly increased in-person social interactions and promoted a sense of community by collecting and displaying user contributions. Citizens could, in real time, draw or write on the CityWall, allowing them to connect with others in person as well as have their contributions seen by future visitors to the site. In Kaldor’s terms, interactive screens allow for the cross-border communication and community building on which the activist version depends (2010).
These examples, however, connect only local communities. Kaldor (2010) shows that growing interconnectedness allowed activists in Eastern Europe and Latin America to seek out international allies and, in what Keck and Sikkink (1998, as cited in Kaldor, 2010) call the “boomerang effect”, to send their demands back onto their own governments. Civil society, once rooted in a specific territory, is thus linked with similar groups in pursuit of a shared cause. Urban screens could provide a public, physical infrastructure for the same kind of linking. Consider a hypothetical: activists in one country display a message on an interactive screen linked to a public square abroad. Both passersby and NGOs abroad could see and amplify the message, pressuring their own governments or international organizations, which in turn pressure the activists’ government. These screens, by existing independently of both algorithmic bias and direct government control, could enable real-time communication regarding civic issues.
Early examples suggest this is possible. The New York-Dublin Portal, which opened in May 2024, streamed live video between the two cities. In June 2024, the National Museum of Mathematics and Maths Week Ireland arranged for primary school students in New York and Dublin to use the portal to challenge each other to solve puzzles (Conlon, 2024). This is certainly not activism, but it shows that a public screen can sustain real-time contact between people across borders.
These screens also have limits. Within a week of its opening, the Portal was temporarily shut down after visitors in Dublin displayed pornographic images and footage of the September 11th attacks. It reopened with reduced hours and an automatic shutdown feature (Kelly, 2024). This reflects a pattern Kaldor describes: networks of civility and incivility emerge together and coexist side by side. The openness that makes screens valuable for global civil society also exposes them to misuse, which raises the question of who decides what content is included. Regardless of who moderates this content, it is crucial that these screens remain independent of the government, as their goal is to amplify public visibility and help activists coordinate across borders, rather than to serve as a direct channel to or from public officials.
A second limit is practicality. My summer field observations suggest that some communities in southern Illinois are unable to adopt digital forms of civic communication due to limited financial resources. In fact, the communities of focus—Pulaski and Alexander County—have two of the lowest rates of broadband and home computer access in the United States. Here, an interactive screen would face significant challenges in its implementation. Awany (2020), writing about international development in South Sudan, argues that the professionalization of civil society has disconnected local civic actors from their communities. For instance, global NGOs have failed to recognize the importance of customary chiefs in conflict resolution. Awany’s argument concerns NGOs, not technology, but the lesson carries over. In both cases, a solution designed elsewhere is introduced without accounting for the institutions and resources already in place. In southern Illinois, the equivalent of a customary chief might be the libraries and churches that already support local civic life. Adopting new technologies or communication channels without accounting for local resources and specific needs could alienate residents rather than promote global interconnection.
Urban screens offer a promising, if imperfect, means of extending the activist version of global civil society. Their ability to deliver civic information without algorithmic filtering, and to connect people both in person and online, could expand the reach of the grassroots movements and transnational NGOs Kaldor (2010) describes, and early projects like the Portal suggest these links can cross national borders. But because civil and uncivil actors coexist, open screens invite misuse and raise the question of who moderates them; and because access to resources and internet service is uneven, they risk excluding the very communities they are meant to serve. Responsible implementation of these technologies will therefore require both resource-sensitive deployment and community-driven moderation.
References
Awany, J. (2020, February 20). International development frameworks force civil society to mimic Western NGOs. Conflict and Civicness Research Blog. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/crp/2020/02/20/international-frameworks-force-civil-society-mimic-western-ngos/
Churchill, E. F., & Nelson, L. (2007). Interactive community bulletin boards as conversational hubs and sites for playful visual repartee. In Proceedings of the 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2007). IEEE.
Conlon, P. (2024, June 13). Dublin and NYC students use The Portal to make maths magic across the Atlantic. Dublin People. https://dublinpeople.com/news/dublin/articles/2024/06/13/54465/
Dylko, I. B. (2016). How technology encourages political selective exposure. Communication Theory, 26(4), 389–409.
Forlano, L., & Mathew, A. (2014). From design fiction to design friction: Speculative and participatory design of values-embedded urban technology. Journal of Urban Technology, 21(4), 7–24.
Kaldor, M. (2010). Five meanings of global civil society. In M. B. Steger (Ed.), Globalization: The greatest hits, a global studies reader (pp. 153–162). Paradigm Publishers.
Kelly, O. (2024, October 22). The Dublin Portal to New York has been shut down permanently, with new link to Philadelphia opening. The Irish Times. https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/dublin/2024/10/22/philadelphia-here-we-come-dublin-portal-link-to-united-states-switches-from-new-york/
Morrison, A., Jacucci, G., & Peltonen, P. (2008). CityWall: Limitations of a multi-touch environment. In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM Conference on Public and Personal Displays (PPD 2008) (pp. 31–35). ACM.
Rose-Stockwell, T. (2023). Outrage machine: How tech amplifies discontent, disrupts democracy—and what we can do about it. Legacy Lit.
Schroeter, R. (2012). Engaging new digital locals with interactive urban screens to collaboratively improve the city. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW ‘12) (pp. 227–236). ACM.
