Engaged Youth » Digital media: what is it good for?

Digital media: what is it good for?

July 15th, 2008 at 03:01pm Deen Freelon Permalink

CLO is a bit late to this particular conversation, but I wanted to spotlight the ongoing dust-up in the civic/political blogosphere over a recent Christian Science Monitor op-ed by Sally Kohn, a youth civic practitioner. The piece, titled “Real Change Happens Offline,” makes a number of controversial claims, some more defensible than others:

. . . Internet activism is individualistic. It’s great for a sense of interconnectedness, but the Internet does not bind individuals in shared struggle the same as the face-to-face activism of the 1960s and ’70s did. It allows us to channel our individual power for good, but it stops there.

This is great for signing a petition to Congress or donating to a cause. But the real challenges in our society – the growing gap between rich and poor, the intransigence of racism and discrimination, the abuses from Iraq to Burma (Myanmar) – won’t politely go away with a few clicks of a mouse. Or even a million.

Daily Kos, the Nation, and CLO adviser Allison Fine have all articulated thoughtful objections to these and other arguments and assumptions embedded in the piece, and Kohn’s response to her critics highlights some of the deep-rooted philosophical differences between partisan Democrats and leftists steeped in critical theory. But I want to sidestep that debate for the time being to focus on an implicit question running through the entire discussion: what, in civic and political terms, is digital media good for? And what projects are better left to the non-digital world?

Kohn’s critics were as quick to dispute the notion that online politics is somehow inherently atomistic as they were to acknowledge the fact that it will never be sufficient to fulfill the goals of most civic and political projects of any significance. Kohn herself seems to view new media as little more than a narrowly helpful supplement to “real” political activity, the vast majority of which plays out offline. But in light of current theoretical understandings and empirical findings, what ought we to expect the internet to do well, and at what point should we begin to curb our enthusiasm? I think we can all agree that new media has made political contributions, petition-signing, and self-expression easier than ever before, but what about changing hearts and minds, civic participation in the legislative process, engaging the disengaged, and hedging against gross concentrations of power (political, economic, cultural, and other)? This question is so basic that we as scholars run the risk of incorrectly assuming that we all agree on the answers, which is why addressing it directly is crucial.

Entry Filed under: adviser conversations, participatory media

3 Comments Add your own

1. Chris Wells | July 25th, 2008 at 3:25 pm

Another great post, Deen. I think you bring up an angle of this debate that is very important for our work here.

I’m going to take for granted what seems to be a general consensus on the article—that the web offers a lot of features helpful to civic engagement, but will not supplant all offline forms–thus, in addition to online activism, citizens need to be part of regular offline activities. Given this, the version of your question that is most intriguing to me is: what kind of exchange between online and offline activities is possible and beneficial to engagement?

Here at CLO, our current study of 89 of the most-trafficked youth civic engagement websites has been looking at one aspect of this question. We have been exploring what form ‘Events’ (or ‘Calendar,’ etc.) pages take, and especially whether site users are able to organize their own events and advertise them. This is of interest because Events pages represent one of the clearest and most common connections between engagement websites—which in many cases are otherwise entirely online—and the offline world.

Within the youth civic sphere, we suspect that many organizations may be wary of allowing users too much latitude with Events pages because of the issue of online predators, despite the potential benefit of providing youth with a tool to connect and organize offline. (We can relate, because in our work with Puget Sound Off—please note: still pre-release—which is rooted in local Seattle life, a concern has been how much we allow users to reveal about their offline worlds—real name? Neighborhood? Zip code? School?) We think that this ‘Events’ measure may reveal something about the attitudes of the organization sponsoring the site—whether it thinks of the web as a space of opportunity and possibility, or danger. (Stephen Coleman wrote about such different views of the web by British youth sites in his contribution to Civic Life Online.)

Our study is also looking at the major presidential candidates’ websites as a way to compare their design with that of youth-focused sites. Perhaps not surprisingly, Obama’s site clearly allows users to create their own events and list them on the site. (Over at e.politics, Colin Delaney wrote about the importance of this online-offline conduit, which plays a key role in allowing the campaign to establish a foothold in a community before professional organizers arrive.)

And interestingly, while at the start of our study McCain’s site had no feature allowing users to create events, our research email just yesterday received a notification about a new feature, McCain Nation, whose primary purpose seems to be allowing supporters to create events. (There’s a brief Boston Globe story about the new feature here.)

All of this makes me think we need to know much more about what kinds of engagement work best online, what kinds work best offline, and how online tools can facilitate both.
2. Howard Rheingold | July 27th, 2008 at 4:35 pm

The blog-enabled grassroots voices and dollars of the Howard Dean campaign propelled an unknown and unannointed candidate to become the front-runner and make fund-raising history by using the Web to aggregate large numbers of small donors. And then the Dean campaign crashed in Iowa, failing to move voters as strongly as the online campaign had moved the Deaniacs.

The Dean campaign has been discussed as a case study on the real world political limitations of Internet-enabled activism. Those discussions, however, should not, while focusing on the very real question about how to move from online enthusiasm to votes in an election, lose sight of the precedents:

1. People who didn’t like the Democratic National Committee’s ideas of a candidate found their voice online, and together with Meetups, turned their dissatisfaction into a quickly growing national and unprecedentedly decentralized movement.

2. Small donors by the millions, via the Internet, suddenly became more effective than the traditional big donors.

Those two principles might also characterize the Obama campaign.

My reason for raising the examples of the Dean and Obama campaigns is to look more broadly at who and how digital networks have shifted political organizing, with an intention to start parsing out more finely the ways in which online and offline actions constitute effective civic engagement.

The Deaniacs didn’t elect their candidate. Maybe the Obama campaign will succeed, in part by extending the Web-based decentralized kind of movement pioneered by Dean’s campaign manager, Joe Trippi. Maybe it won’t. But in the case of the Dean for America bloggers, the don’t forget to consider the fact that people whose opinions had not seemed to be influencing national politics had a way to find each other, get together, and support a traditional political campaign. Asking how to turn those voices into votes is the all-important question in political campaigns, and if online enthusiasm fails to influence policy through elections, then other benefits of democratized access to communication may be moot.

However, I would not want to discount the power of giving people a voice. If blogs or online videos gave a voice in the democratic discussion to people who had not previously had a voice, I would want to look more closely at the benefits of that broadening of voice — without asking, at least in the short run, whether those voices have yet succeeded in getting someone elected.

In summary: Yes, it’s good to take a critical look at what netroots activism can and cannot accomplish in terms of elections and policy — but that should not distract all of our attention from the emergence of new voices, literacies, vernaculars.

If getting candidates elected is more important than just talking about civic issues — is talking about civic issues better than not talking (or caring) about them at all?
3. Sally Kohn | July 30th, 2008 at 11:29 am

Finally getting around to responding to your great post; thanks for such a thoughtful sifting of the questions. Indeed, my point wasn’t that online organizing is useless or ineffective or somehow a waste of time but that we indeed should curb our enthusiasm and recognize that change — and particularly, dramatic, structural social and political reforms — likely can’t happen through online activism alone. I know many of the leaders in the online activism world appreciate this; the danger is if most of those doing the clicking don’t.