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.