Enjoyed my conversation on Democracy Innovators, a Civic Tech podcast out of Europe. Recorded a few weeks ago, but the topic has only become more important across the globe. democracyinnovators.com/martin-carca...
24.09.2025 15:10 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0@mcarcasson.bsky.social
Professor of Communication Studies at Colorado State University. I direct the CSU Center for Public Deliberation (www.cpd.colostate.edu), which is a nonpartisan organization focused on improving the quality of public discussion and local problem-solving.
Enjoyed my conversation on Democracy Innovators, a Civic Tech podcast out of Europe. Recorded a few weeks ago, but the topic has only become more important across the globe. democracyinnovators.com/martin-carca...
24.09.2025 15:10 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Way back in grad school, I used this tool to analyze how US presidents from 1988 to 2000 talked about climate change, and how we could potentially reframe things. (though I've adjusted things a bit on spheres) drive.google.com/file/d/1ADtO...
16.07.2025 16:04 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0The public sphere combines them all, and it is always an interesting point of analysis of which one(s) dominate(s). Biofuels seems like a clear example of the political frame (& economic for a small group) somehow dominating science & common sense. But the more we learn about it, that can change.
16.07.2025 15:48 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0So in argumentation there is a tool we use that talks about how argument works in different technical spheres (the primary ones are politics, science, law, economics, and morality). What counts as a good argument is different in each sphere. Conflict often when people focus on different spheres....
16.07.2025 15:44 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0I agree, but I would also argue that sometimes "virtue signaling" was seeing an issue through too simplistic of a frame. Most issues involve many underlying values, & you can proclaim you are virtuous by simplifying it to one, thus implying people that disagree must be against that value/are evil.
12.07.2025 18:13 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Would be nice...
25.06.2025 16:53 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Enjoyed my conversation with Nathanial Pearlman for his Great Battlefield podcast, talking about the work of the CPD and bringing people together to address their shared problems. Check it out (and his earlier conversations with lots of interesting guests).
greatbattlefield.com/episode/coll...
local journalism matters.
12.06.2025 22:17 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Listening to Cornell West and Robert George start off the UCCS Conference on Civic Discourse in Colorado Springs.
05.06.2025 16:54 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Somehow haven't heard "No news is bad news." I'll have to remember that.
04.06.2025 14:51 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Did it cite studies that don't exist?
04.06.2025 03:14 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Been reading more lately about how new tech platforms & apps are developed to flip the script from the typical "outrage industrial complex" workings of most social media & actually work to bring people together and incentivize quality engagement. This essay provides a nice summary of those efforts.
30.05.2025 18:27 — 👍 2 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0Article that I am pulling the term from is here, from @debilyn.bsky.social thefulcrum.us/money-politi...
28.05.2025 23:11 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Here is how I see our current challenge (your point fits with information disorder, which combines overwhelming information overload with a crippled ability to process it and make important distinctions btw spectacle and substance).
28.05.2025 15:49 — 👍 5 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Briand's Practical Politics provided an early blueprint for the CPD.
28.05.2025 14:38 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0I keep on playing with the word choices, and added a new bullet this morning, but getting pretty close to locking these in for my book.
24.05.2025 13:32 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0One of the most important books during grad school for me was Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric. It taught me how to think more deeply about values and their role in individual & community decision making (early seeds that led to all my work on wicked problems & polarity management)
23.05.2025 14:36 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0As I work on my book, I wrote up a bit of my intellectual history, thinking about the academic disciplines and practitioner specialties I've bounced around for the last 20 years. Part of this was also thinking about the most influential books during that journey.
23.05.2025 14:34 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 2 📌 0Seems like he could have just had AI write the books really quickly to cover up the mistake.
20.05.2025 15:41 — 👍 2 🔁 2 💬 1 📌 0You may need to round up the Newies for another fight.
17.05.2025 22:07 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Reminds me of the Paul Harvey and his “and now for the rest of the story” bits.
www.forbes.com/sites/jeremy...
Pretty sure my favorite warning in pharmaceutical commericials is "do not take if allergic."
10.05.2025 02:47 — 👍 6 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I reread it today; nothing in the law allows a president to defund PBS and NPR. In fact, Congress specifically sought to insulate public media from political pressure.
03.05.2025 01:42 — 👍 20812 🔁 7294 💬 393 📌 367Seems like it’s trolling to see the “libs” freak out (and often a red herring to distract from other things). Freaking out on it helps it serve its purpose (just like his rally). Horrible that trolling is a governing model, but that is where we are.
29.04.2025 23:47 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Citizens’ assemblies have earned a significant new seal of approval.
The UK's top political podcast „The Rest is Politics“ stands out as a running indictment of electoral representation as a system of government, implicitly at least.
www.linkedin.com/pulse/citize...
#CitizensAssembly
Great webinar about the civic assembly the CPD is assisting with here in Fort Collins. I'm not very involved -- I'm on sabbatical -- but my colleagues Katie Knobloch & Sabrina Slagowski-Tipton have been killing it working w American Public Trust & Healthy Democracy www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxc3...
25.04.2025 02:23 — 👍 3 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 1Fellow authors, I love you, and I know it feels like we don’t have a choice, but B&N and Am*zon both scheduled sales this week to preempt Independent Bookstore Day, a hugely vital source of income for indie bookstores. Please don’t promote their sales; please promote your local indie this week.
23.04.2025 23:52 — 👍 5218 🔁 2217 💬 61 📌 125So when efforts at managing misinformation involvedcensorship (deleting/not allowing certain opinions), I can see problems there. But seems like most efforts (like what Facebook was doing) was providing counterspeech, which should be strongly supported. Free speech cannot be free from criticism.
24.04.2025 00:19 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0I see it primarily as the conflating of censorship and criticism. Censorship (not allowing certain ideas to be expressed) is very often bad, but criticism (pushing back on ideas) is important, particularly to deal with the bad information that gets through because of free speech.
24.04.2025 00:11 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Conversation around this vinn diagram.
10.04.2025 19:10 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0