Success and failure in online civic engagement
What determines whether attempts at online youth civic engagement succeed or fail? Eszter Hargittai tackles a question very similar to this one in her recent contribution to a discussion of Clay Shirky’s latest book, Here Comes Everybody. But you don’t need to have read the book to apply Hargittai’s core insight to the issues we’ve been discussing on this blog:
While it is certainly the case that new technologies, tools and services are leveling the playing field, existing societal position and resources still matter. The question is: when do they matter more or less? Under what circumstances do people with less resources still manage to benefit from the new tools in ways that would have been difficult earlier? What are the examples of mobilization that do not involve people with PhDs, ones with noteable techie know-how or one’s with considerable financial resources either themselves or among those in their networks? There are such examples, certainly, but it would be interesting to see systematically what it is that unites them. What commonality is there among such cases that suggests a true leveling of the playing field that goes beyond allocating more opportunities to those who are already considerably privileged? (On a sidenote, these issues are similar to the ones I raised while discussing Yochai Benkler’s book The Wealth of Networks.)
What is important to understand from a youth civic engagement perspective is that not all youth are equally proficient at using digital media. Terms such as “digital natives” and “DotNets,” used by scholars and civic practitioners alike, imply the opposite when applied broadly to the current generation of adolescents and young adults. A better conceptualization of online youth engagement might begin by observing that only some youth fit the tech-savvy “digital native” archetype, and continue by asking how the digitally disadvantaged can best be brought to the virtual table. As a local example illustrating this divide, members of the CLO team have anecdotally observed alarmingly low levels of email proficiency among some of the low-income youth with whom they have come into contact. Instead of maintaining consistent email addresses, they seem to be caught in a ongoing cycle of email address registration, abandonment, and re-registration fueled by chronic password forgetfulness. Reaching these young people via participatory civic sites will remain a Sisyphean endeavor until they learn to master this most fundamental of online skills.
Much of the breathless internet triumphalism effusing forth from the popular press tends to downplay the strong possibility that preexisting inequalities will, in the absence of action to redress them, persist in online contexts (this is not to imply that Shirky’s book falls into this category; I haven’t read it). This holds true for youth civic sites no less than for any other type of participatory media. In addition to Eszter’s general questions, then, I would like to pose a few of my own:
- What can be done to make online civic spaces more appealing to diverse groups of youth? What are some effective ways to avoid falling into the trap of simply placing a piece of technology into the world and expecting an energized, diverse user base to emerge autonomously?
- What offline structures need to be constructed to ensure that youth civic sites attract more than just the “usual suspects,” i.e. young people who have already bought into the value of civic engagement?
- What other online exemplars devoted to youth engagement can we look to that have managed to navigate these issues with a relative measure of success? What can we learn from them?
Edit: According to a recent report from Scientific American, a new University of Minnesota study has found that
even the least privileged kids have profiles on MySpace and Facebook. And they’re on the internet all the time. That finding goes against past studies that have found a ‘digital divide’ between rich and poor kids.
This looks like a pretty egregious non-sequitir to me, as the fact that poor kids have social network profiles is not evidence of the absence of a digital divide. Eszter, I’d be particularly interested to see what you have to say about this. (Can’t find the actual study write-up, but here’s an interview with the PI.)
Entry Filed under: adviser conversations, digital learning skills, participatory media
10 comments June 25th, 2008 at 03:39pm
Deen Freelon
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