Engaged Youth » Success and failure in online civic engagement

Success and failure in online civic engagement

June 25th, 2008 at 03:39pm Deen Freelon Permalink

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 Add your own

1. Lance Bennett | June 29th, 2008 at 8:27 am

I agree with Eszter (whose participation in this conversation would be most welcome) that we need to know far more about the distribution of various skills — and in our case, this includes civic communication skills. Part of the Civic Learning Online project is to develop standards for online civic learning and find ways to promote their achievement. What we have learned from school-based civic education is that it is not easy to achieve civic learning gains in most schools, particularly schools with lower SES populations. Even in high SES schools, many of the civic gains can be explained by home environment and general academic performance. What is appealing about online civic communities is that we have a somewhat freer hand in the design and in the opportunities they offer young people for authentic engagement with issues and concerns that matter to them. Yet we still need to identify what skills they bring with them, what skills they need, what skills they use most effectively, and how to deliver and assess them.
2. Jon Hickey | June 30th, 2008 at 12:39 pm

I agree with Lance that we need to be able to identify what types of skills youth have and what skills they need when creating online civic communities. However, I think we as designers of these communities must also do a better job of understanding how kids approach civic online communities, along with other online services such as e-mail.

Deen points out that “the CLO team [has] 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.” Thinking back to my high school years (1998-2002), I remember going through many different e-mail addresses. Sometimes this was due to forgetting a password. Often, though, it was due to an identity shift. My love of swing music began to wane as a sophomore, so my e-mail address relating to swing music seemed old. It was time for a change. My point here is that what may be seen as simply functional for an adult may be a part of a teenager’s identity.

It is hard to answer the question about what will make online civic spaces more appealing to diverse groups of youth. However, I think it is safe to say that these spaces need to be highly user generated. I believe the more adults try to guide a site in a certain direction, the more they will push youth away, largely due to the disconnect between youth and adults.
3. Chris Wells | July 6th, 2008 at 10:08 pm

What I’d like to add to this discussion is that the online civic engagement divide is not only digital—it also emerges from the different civic skills and inclinations that youth bring to their use of the web. I was really struck by the U of Minnesota finding of nearly saturation use of digital media and social networking sites, even among the least privileged. While I agree that widespread reported use of Facebook or Myspace doesn’t mean the digital divide is inconsequential, I think it does show young people from across the income spectrum independently identifying similar benefits of those resources—in this case, connecting with friends and staying informed. I take this as a hopeful sign that even without equality of digital access or education, youth from very different backgrounds sometimes do identify and take advantage of digital resources in similar ways. (Notably, we can be virtually certain they are not learning Facebook skills at school.)

This brings me to the question of whether civic uses of digital media will have the same equality of perceived usefulness—and hence adoption—as social uses (apparently) do. I’m concerned that they will not, because of a divide between more civically engaged youth and those less engaged. A recent paper by Joe Kahne describes the civic participation gap and the civic opportunity divide in schools that is partly responsible. What worries me is that while social uses of digital media may be intuitive for nearly all youth—perhaps once basic technical skills are acquired—civic uses may need more nurturing. If so, widely differing levels of civic nurturing may wind up as responsible for online civic divides as differences in digital skills themselves.

To add to Eszter’s question, then, I would ask: What kinds of civic/political opportunities online will appeal to youth who not do not benefit from technical advantages, but who also have little experience with—and little offline foundation for—the civic/political world they’re being asked to participate in?

On a hopeful note, at the end of a recent post to the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning blog, Kahne suggests that classroom opportunities to connect the digital world to civic action may be more evenly distributed than other civic opportunities. That’s an intriguing finding I would be interested in hearing more about.
4. Eszter Hargittai | July 7th, 2008 at 10:58 am

I have two articles that would suggest continued differences in use of the various services being mentioned here. First, a paper I wrote about social networking site usage suggests that students’ background predicts which network they join, and whether they do so. I am working on another paper to look at the extent to which students use different SNSs regularly and what they do on them. (It’s a very baseline measure to ask simply whether someone has an account on such a service vs whether someone uses it rarely, sometimes or often. It’s not clear if that’s what the UMN study measured, I’ve written to the author to ask for a copy of the study.)

A more recent piece that I co-authored with Gina Walejko looks at content creation and sharing online. Although there we did not observe differences in sharing by race or parental education, we did observe differences by gender. Also, content creation is related to a student’s socioeconomic status. (Send me a note for a copy of this paper.)

The evidence I have collected suggests continued divergences in what students from different backgrounds do online especially once we go past simple binary measures of usage (e.g., yes/no has a profile on MySpace). There’s also much more work to be done looking at what it is exactly that youth are doing on these sites. My impression is that they do a few things a lot, but not that many different things and they also differ considerably in their understanding of various SNS functionalities.
5. Peter Levine | July 9th, 2008 at 3:46 pm

This is an important topic and I appreciate the insights offered so far. I would only add that there are two dimensions to worry about if we want to see all kinds of kids involved in civic work online:

1) inequalities in the use of various tools, and
2) inequalities in civic and political interest, efficacy, knowledge, and networks.

I have worked a lot in a particular high school that is predominantly working-class and overwhelming minority. Most of the kids use some social networking tools, although they are mostly not very good with email and web searching. More importantly, they are left out of most discussions of political and social events and issues. The kids have useful discussions of music and culture that one can build on. But the odds are that they will use their Internet access for non-political purposes, whereas kids in nearby middle-class schools will at least occasionally become involved in political causes online.

I suspect it is the offline context (the schools’ culture and curriculum; the relationship of the local community to the police and the state) that causes these differences.
6. Joseph Kahne | July 9th, 2008 at 10:30 pm

So many of these comments resonate for me. This focus on inequality is clearly key and often overlooked or underconceptualized. Of course, how to conceptualize new media and inequalitty is not clear. What does seem clear and reflected in what’s written above is that the forms of political and educational inequalities that shape our society exert real influence on participation with new media. But there also seem to be some significant reasons to think that forms of inequality in relation to online life and civics may be slightly less built into the structure of institutions than in some other cases.

We’ve been finding that the digitally relevant civic learning opps students get in schools are more equitably distributed than are the general civic learning opps they get in schools…. So, for example, while the likelihood of students in classes with high average ses getting chances for open discussions about current events is far greater than for those in classes with lower ses, we aren’t seeing those differences when it comes to things like being asked to use the internet to get multiple perspectives on an issue. We aren’t quite sure what’s going on here, but it may be a hopeful sign that this more open environment may also be more equitable…

If we are to try and make civic life and political voice more equitable, we need to identify the factors driving the gaps and even more difficult - see what can be done about them. One key step towards building a plan, of course, is knowing more about what skills and interests really are key and what forms of inequality in the new media world are most problematic. As we learn more about these questions, it will help focus energy more productively.
7. Lance Bennett | July 14th, 2008 at 1:43 am

This is a great set of comments. I am interested in following up on Joe’s finding about use of internet for developing multiple perspectives. What is the level of this? What are the levels of open discussions in high and low ses classes? It will be interesting to track these levels over time.
8. Thomas Sander | July 14th, 2008 at 9:47 am

Interesting post and comments. I recall a comment by Paul DiMaggio (Princeton) on work he was doing probably 5-6 years back on the digital divide (not focused specifically on youth).

He noted that the digital divide was morphing rather than disappearing (i.e. more and more had access to computers and Internet, but then the question became how fast the connection was, etc.). And the interesting comment, very relevant to this conversation and Joe Kahne’s comment about the fact that ACCESS to digital civic opportunities was less class structured, is that DiMaggio noted that access to the Internet without critical thinking skills about how to judge the veracity of sites, how to effectively do research on the Internet, etc. might simply amplify the class divide rather than narrow it. With a plethora of on-line *information* and lots of half-truths circulating, getting digital access may be only a small part of the challenge. The real challenge is how to weigh the information, mobilize others, harness it to effective use, etc.
9. Deen Freelon | July 14th, 2008 at 11:39 am

One thing we all seem to agree on is that skills and interests, rather than access, are the core issues in assessing and prescribing solutions for the digital divide among youth. What we at CLO have observed informally is that the participatory functionalities of the net are dominated by high-SES folks, whereas both high- and low-SES tend to enjoy passive, old-media-style content. There may be a network effect at work here–if you feel as though many of your peers will be blogging, uploading video, etc. along with you, you’ll be more likely to do so as well. But youth may be less likely to contribute if they don’t think people like them will be tuning in. Peter Levine makes a similar point in his essay for the Civic Life Online volume–the right kind of audience is key. If this analysis is correct, one of the keys to overcoming the problems we’ve been discussing would seem to be building culturally relevant communities of practice in which civic skills can thrive. The organization Global Kids of New York has a strong model for just this type of community-building . . .
10. Hilary | July 29th, 2008 at 3:19 pm

This is a great discussion and really resonates with some of the work we are doing in terms of engaging young people and encouraging their participation. Locally we are finding that young people from set social groups focus on particular SNS. So for example one group may use Bebo but won’t use Facebook. In the work we are involved in these are some key issues. We are also experiencing some elements of a digital divide with underacheiving young people less likely to explore and use the internet regularly.