Dr. Jeff Hou

Yeah, thank you.

Nice to join.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, I think the role of public space is still critical to democracy.

If we look at how democracy works, right, so people have to express their opinion freely.

They need to gather, they need to communicate, they need to engage in debate.

They need to kind of make their presence known to the state.

And so public space still play that traditional role, but it's just that public space now does not just include the actual physical space.

It also includes the online forum, the social media,

So there's a whole other realm of public space that exists virtually online, on your device.

And today, they are just as powerful as the actual physical space.

And in some way, it became even more prevalent in terms of how people talk to each other, how they are connected to each other.

So it has become more complicated.

And also, the technology has allowed authoritarian states to monitor people in the public space.

Oftentimes, space comes with surveillance.

So even though the space may be there, people are not able to gather.

And so we're at a moment, interesting kind of historical moment in which we're experiencing the sort of this kind of disconnect between space and what they're meant to perform.

And then how democracy work, both in physical realm and in the online kind of realm.

And that's the whole kind of purpose of kind of public space become sort of diminished.

Oh, absolutely.