A Physical Public Square in the Digital Age
LONDON—London’s Hyde Park may be one of the city’s largest parks, but it’s also one of its most typical. Across its expansive 350 acres can be found park goers doing the usual park things: weekend picnics, pickup frisbee games, or bike rides along its winding paths. There’s an art gallery, a café, and a lake for swimming and paddle boating. And on its northeastern corner, every Sunday afternoon, there is something that looks a lot like chaos.
But it’s not entirely that. In reality, it’s just a crowd of people, most of them men, gathered around an individual preaching from a makeshift soapbox, occasionally heckling the speaker. What makes this weekly scene so remarkable, though, is that it’s a collection of acquaintances and strangers having heated debates with each other about politics and religion—in real life, not over the internet.
Speakers’ Corner, as the meeting place is formally known, isn’t some relic of a bygone era. For more than a century, this shaded park corner has attracted hundreds, if not thousands, of people each week to debate, listen, and learn from the people speaking there. Its continued pull despite the advent of social that is often associated with it) is a testament to the enduring value of real-life debate—the kind that doesn’t involve trolls and ad hominem attacks, but instead relies on a sometimes-shifting community of people committed to engaging with each other week after week.
