Rebuilding the Digital Town Square: Designing Social Media for Meaningful Connection

Abstract

Social media platforms once promised to become the digital town squares of modern life: places where people could gather, share ideas, maintain relationships, and build communities across distance. Platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok reshaped public conversation, professional networking, friendship, creativity, and everyday social life.

 The lecture is structured around three themes:

1. The rise and fragmentation of the digital town square
   Early online communities and later social media platforms created new spaces for public conversation, weak ties, professional identity, and shared culture. This section examines why communities migrate between platforms, and what is lost when once-vibrant digital publics fracture.
2. The attention economy and the failure of curation
   Social media taught us that attention could be monetized at scale. Algorithmic feeds promise relevance, but often narrow what people see and make users feel less in control. This section explores why “time on platform” is a poor proxy for meaningful connection, and why users need more agency over feeds, networks, and recommendations.
3. From attention to intention: are we doing it again with AI?
   As people drift toward smaller or more purpose-driven spaces — such as WhatsApp groups, Discord, Mastodon, and Substack — conversational AI introduces a new version of the same problem. Social media monetized what people looked at and clicked on. AI systems may go further, becoming always-available thought partners that help people formulate goals, opinions, doubts, and intentions.

The central message is that the decline of meaningful social media is not inevitable. It is a design, governance, and business-model problem. Platforms designed for autonomy, reflection, trust, and meaningful interaction can better support the forms of connection people actually value.

Watch a sample of the lecture online: The LLM Paradox: We Use Them Constantly, But Are They Helping?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y4ehueNSpY

About this Lecture

Request this Lecture

To request this particular lecture, please complete this online form.

Request a Tour

To request a tour with this speaker, please complete this online form.

All requests will be sent to ACM headquarters for review.