Reflections on Week 12: Civic Engagement

When I was in high school, the Chicago Public Schools system system started a mandatory 20-hour “service learning” graduation requirement. Service learning is meant to teach teens civic responsibility and engagement, but for most students it just had the oxymoronic meaning of “mandatory volunteer work.” Last week’s readings were of particular interest to me because I remember walking into the first Key Club meeting during the first school year with a service learning graduation requirement and I also remember how many people whined about the pointlessness of volunteering and looked for the least active thing they could possibly do.

So could online tools for civic engagement be the answer? I hope they do make a difference. Emily Barney wrote in a previous post about participatory culture that “If people can tell that they're being listened to, they're much more likely to make an effort to speak their own words” and I think that’s why participatory culture and online tools have such potential to make civic engagement “truly social” for youth.

Some tools and aspects of tools seem misguided to me and prevent much real change from occurring. For example, a majority of online petitions or the “blast emails” that Kamilla mentions. Stuff like that reminds me of the comment in Using Participatory Media and Public Voice to Encourage Civic Engagement about “warning of the danger that people would sit in front of their computers and mistake typing at each other for political action.” Plus, the Youth as E-Citizens researchers said: “What strikes us as curious, however, is the lack of attention paid to the end result.” It’s as if these tools are helping us swim in a circle.

I’m also very much against a lot of things written in the Digital Democracy: Intersections of Practice, Policy, and the Marketplace article, which asks us to accept that “[t]he intrusion of marketing into these digital social spaces does not necessarily mean that youth cannot still use them to engage in political debate and civic discourse.” Who’s going to seriously join the revolution if it’s disturbingly branded by Pepsi? So I was relieved when I read A Public Voice for Youth: The Audience Problem in Digital Media and Civic Education and read that ”[n]ot many of the successful blogs that arose between 2000 and 2002 had significant financial backing or famous writers.”

Speaking of blogging as an act of civic engagement, there were sections in our readings that mention how to blog effectively towards a particular audience with the goal of being heard. Creating information and putting it out there is not enough, though who knows what strange paths information takes when it comes to the internet. I do see how “tunnel vision” might be an issue, but political camps have been preaching to their respective choirs for so long that tunnel vision on blogs just seems like the continuation of a long-running symptom.

The public nature of the internet is inspiring in some ways. I can easily imagine ten thousand people attending a protest and those ten thousand protesters being ignored or given one-sided coverage by mainstream media. But I can easily imagine even a small percentage of those protesters using online tools to publicize themselves in an attempt to keep discourse alive long after mainstream media has stopped airing one-dimensional sound bites by supposed experts about them. Like it says in Using Participatory Media, “[p]articipatory media are social media whose value and power derives from the active participation of many people … Social networks, when amplified by information and communication networks, enable broader, faster, and lower cost coordination of activities.” (So even if there is a degree of tunnel vision, at least it’s tunnel vision with a lower cost of coordination of activities. I am half-kidding and half-serious about this.)

In my interview with Kimberlie Kranich of the Youth Media Workshop, Kimberlie mentions how technical skills are not what’s important, that building relationships are the truly life-changing, opportunity-creating parts of the workshop. And I think this relates to talking of online tools as means of getting kids engaged civically. Obviousl, blogging itself isn’t what matters:

“… The way in which that population uses the medium will matter. The literacies that this curriculum seeks to impart could be a crucially influential battle in this struggle over the political impact of blogging. Knowing how to take a tool into one’s hand is no guarantee that anyone will do anything productive, but without such knowledge, productive use is less likely—and hegemonic control becomes more likely by those who do know exactly how to exercise the power of the new media” (Using Participatory Media).

In the “Facing the Future” section of the Youth as E-Citizens report, I liked some of the good things the researchers noted about online tools, which gives youth access to experts, ease of conducting basic civic tasks, opportunities for youth to showcase their own creations, interchange with distant and different peoples and perspectives, and other things as well. The students in the Youth Media Workshop take advantage of these things every year, which heartens me considerably. I want to believe these kinds of projects matter no matter what their scale, and that they can ultimately make a difference in how people choose to act, think, and live.

MyBarackObama.com - Grassroots Organizing Online

Note: I know national politics are not quite the thing to bring into a classroom discussion, but I do believe this is a unique situation and it definitely connects to our discussions about civic involvement. I especially wanted to bring it up in response to Kamilla's post questioning just how relevant the forms of civic engagment you see online really are. I hope y'all don't mind too much. :)

First and foremost, I highly recommend reading this article showing how all the pretty things on Obama's website (a NYT article compared it to the Mac/Apple website) are connected to the actual on-the-ground organizing in the primary campaign so far:

The Machinery of Hope: Inside the grass-roots field operation of Barack Obama, who is transforming the way political campaigns are run
by TIM DICKINSON, Rolling Stone, March 20, 2008 (Issue 1048, p. 36-42 in the print)

I found all the information about the training process they've been using very interesting, especially this part:

"We decided that we didn't want to train volunteers [...] We want to train organizers - folks who can fend for themselves."

To work out that ethic on their website, they've created the "My.BarackObama.Com" platform within the general campaign site, allowing people to blog and do event organizing and fundraising and all kinds of other social networking from their space.

They also make it easy for anyone who wants to remix their media in their posts to do so, making videos available through YouTube and photos on Flickr and so forth. Then they're able to link back to those blog posts and videos and so forth to show how people's stories connect with their campaign or what their supporters are concerned about.

Moving from the primaries into the general election, they're continuing their training program and promoting it heavily right now through all their web tools:
Obama Organizing Fellows

I got an e-mail about that program at work and talked about it with my boss, who's been curious about all the hype about younger people following Obama and wondering how that connects to all this technology stuff. I told her the first time I noticed anything about Obama online was when my friends started joining groups on facebook - they were created by supporters, not the campaign, and were able to ratchet up support and actual fundraising very quickly because they could hook into the social features of the campaign website so smoothly.

This is exactly why Obama is marketing himself as someone who raises money through small donations: his campaign is drawing on the full range of people's commitment ability. This can include the die-hards who will apply for an intensive training program and commit to working 30 hours a week or people who are willing to let other volunteers from out of town stay with them for free while they attend those trainings. It also includes people who will call a friend in a primary state and persuade them to register to vote by a certain date or people who can only give $10 here and there when they're able. But they find a way to make any level of participation seem meaningful, which is exactly why it works so well.

Like the Jenkins paper we read on participatory culture, it's absolutely essential to the ethics/etiquette/mores/whatever of these social sites that you create a welcoming environment where novices can be mentored and everyone feels that they not only can contribute something but that whatever they can do will be valued by others.

I know the stereotype about millenials is that they need constant reinforcement - I don't know how true that is, but I do think it's an aspect of these online settings for a reason. Like using emoticons to adjust your tone in e-mail or on forum posts, giving feedback is essential to making participatory sites seem truly social. If people can tell that they're being listened to, they're much more likely to make an effort to speak their own words.

This is true offline, too, of course, but it isn't common in the political process. When I was a kid I remember helping my dad pass out flyers for a congressional candidate that he thought would make a big difference in Chicago - Michael Patrick Flanagan (who was running for Dan Rostenkowski's seat). It was raining and cold the day we passed them out, but we got a lot done and when we came back Flanagan was in his office and came out to thank us personally. That was probably my most direct participation in the electoral process that I can think of, but it isn't what I remember most.

After Flanagan was elected, my father read something about him in the paper he didn't like and sent him a paper chiding him for going back on his promises. A couple weeks later we got a call from the congressman, who wanted to talk to my dad personally and explain how the news story was distorting his actions. We were all kind of gobsmacked - it isn't the sort of thing you expect in Chicago if you aren't related to an alderman. :)

I do think it's great that Obama has been successful in getting a lot of people actively involved in the political process who haven't been interested before. But campaigns can do that - the real change that needs to happen, the change that Kamilla was wondering about, is in the second part of my story. We need people who will hold their elected officials accountable, and we need elected officials who take that kind of feedback seriously. Have any of you seen that happening online?

Panel Presentation on Civic Engagement and Digital Technologies

You might be interested in reading this news release from the MacArthur Foundation on a recent panel on civic engagement. You'll recognize several names of folks whose work we've been reading and talking about this semester.

Youth as Distracted or Overwhelmed E-Citizens?

Is it possible that the web can create Youth as E-Citizens? and Should it?

As I am currently in Florida for our Spring Break, I actually took a few minutes by the pool to glance at reading material other than class readings or for my work.

I chanced upon an article in Oprah Magazine’s April issue about how we can make the world a better place. Most all of the professionals quoted focused on local efforts, and even reduced the effort to small acts within our own sphere of family, friends, and passersby. In other words, start making the world better by responding in our community.

I quote here Lynn Nottage, an award winning playwright, who gave me cause to think about youth and our current reading about Youth websites geared toward society involvement. Ms. Nottage says:

“Our culture has vastly overvalued the lives of the rich and famous. Our children no longer hunger to be good citizens, but merely well-known ones. In our misguided quest for heroes, we’ve made fame the most coveted virtue.”
She goes on to say that if we continue to idolize celebrity and movie stars that don’t do anything heroic, it dilutes our culture of real meaning. I completely agree with her suggestion that we “ boycott celebrity and celebrate the unnamed warriors trying to make a positive impact on our daily lives.”

While I agree, how do we steer today’s youth away from this image obsessed, flash-is-best type of mentality? This is difficult because so many adults subscribe to this as well.

The civic minded websites have a huge competition on their hands to get kids away from games, and fan sites, music and IMing friends. These civic sites may be great for teachers and scouting organizations, but I doubt that kids will get involved on their own without facilitation.

Is an online community where people are faceless the type of involvement that our young people need at their age? I do have concerns as it states on page 8 that such involvement provides only a “sense” of community, and not the real thing. Is it overwhelming to make our kids think that they must work on problems in Rwanda when they could be involved here at home physically at a local food bank or Senior Center or homeless shelter?

Is it overwhelming to offer kids a plethora of choices to get involved? As an adult, I am often indecisive and depressed about the condition of lives across the world, the wolf population, extinct species, and genocide. I could more easily impact the world if I got off the computer and walked down the street to help a neighbor or some other act. Looking at YouthNoise.com for example, the choices are endless in which to help in the world.

I think it is wonderful for children to become engaged and get involved, and at the same time, I think too much exposure to all that is wrong with the world is the reason there are so many young people on Prozac.

Any comments?