How do people who’ve grown up using the internet engage in civic life? I see great potential and great possible harm from some of these experiments. I worry we’re heading uncritically towards a different way of conceiving of the civic relationships between individuals and governments. But I also think that if we can figure out how to harness these internet-based forms of civic engagement, we might revitalize political participation.
There’s a worthwhile critique of discussions about the internet and civic engagement that asks why we’d impute any special powers to a communication medium. I agree that we are oversimplifying situations when we declare that Facebook overthrew Mubarak or that Chinese authoritarianism cannot survive the rise of Weibo microblogging services. But it would also be a mistake not to take seriously the role of new communications media in understanding civic life. In democratic states, citizens need information about what challenges a government faces and what it’s proposing to do about it to be effective citizens. And citizens need to be able to connect with one another to discuss, debate and propose solutions. What a communications medium makes possible has a shaping influence on civic life.
In the United States, the government made an investment early on in a technology designed to connect citizens so they could govern themselves. This wasn’t the internet, but the postal system, established in the US Constitution, and implemented in a way that encouraged citizens to use the mail, the connective technology of the time, as a civic space. The postal system subsidized the distribution of newspapers, allowing newspaper publishers to trade “exchange copies” with other publishers at no cost, a phenomenon which meant content was often reprinted, with a paper in one state offering perspectives from a distant city. It cost so much less to send a newspaper than a private letter that frugal correspondents sometimes composed letters by placing pinpricks under words in newspaper articles. With costs of newspapers so low, many Americans subscribed to several papers, reading news and opinion from multiple political and geographic perspectives. (I’m leaning heavily on Paul Starr’s The Creation of the Media here, both for the historical events and the core insight on media structure and democratic process).
As the structure of the media industry changed, we see some parallel changes in politics. The rise of advertising as a major source of newspaper revenue, replacing subscription, encouraged newspapers to move from partisan, opinionated organs to “objective” papers that sought to report events in a way to attract readers of all political persuasions. Papers increased in size and began covering more national and international events, relying on reports via telegraph to provide information, and published less opinion content. This shift from a multifaceted party press, with a great deal of local color and opinion, to a more nationally focused press coincides with the rise of a strong two party system and the lessening of local influence over political platforms. As broadcast media, and especially television, become dominant media forms, politics becomes synchronized nationally. It’s no longer possible to speak one way in one region, and differently in another – pander to segregationists in the South and you’ll be seen by an audience in the North as well. My friend danah boyd refers to “unseen audiences” in her work on social media – young people writing to their friends on Facebook aren’t always cognizant of future employers, who might read their posts. Politicians quickly became aware of these unseen audiences and changed their rhetoric to appeal to these wider audiences. (...)
The old civics taught us how to identify authority figures to influence and understand processes to lobby for change. A new digital civics teaches us how to raise attention for causes, how to use distributed populations to propose solutions to problems, and how to synchronize supporters around a strategy.
by Ethan Zuckerman, DMLCentral | Read more:
Image: codyvaldes http://www.flickr.com/photos/codyvaldes/4863401480/
