Activism Style of Millenials

September 8th, 2008 at 08:06pm Chris Wells Permalink

I’d like to follow up on the debate over Sally Kohn’s Real Change Happens Offline (see DailyKos’ georgia10’s response, Allison Fine’s post at Social Citizens Blog, and our own CLO post on the debate), because I think it is rich in the ideas we tangle with here at CLO.

So far, this debate has mainly focused on technology, with the central question being: are Millennials spending too much time on webby activism, and not enough on offline activism?

I want to add to that focus an awareness that, concurrently with the development of the web, citizens have been changing their participation habits to engage more often with looser, networked communities that fit into increasingly busy schedules and complex political identities. (It’s quite clear that this trend started before the web—but can it be a coincidence that many of the tools developed for the web enable just those sorts of online communities?) So there are at least two models of political action—ways of approaching and preferring to engage with the political world—at work, apart from web use. (A number of scholars have theorized those models, including Lance Bennett, whose Dutiful/self-Actualizing approach is being employed in our current CLO research, and was recently blogged about.)

The ‘problem’ is thus not simply that Millenials are online too much, but that many of the forms of action that made sense a generation ago don’t resonate as meaningful. Given this, the most fruitful approach to engaging Millennials may be less to push them to get offline, and more to discover ways in which their starting point on the web leads them to opportunities that are effective in the offline world. Where might such crossovers take place? I’ve been thinking about two recent, very conventionally political actions that tried to engage supporters in the both the online and offline worlds: Howard Dean’s 2004 primary run, and Barack Obama’s current campaign.

Dean’s 2004 campaign looks like an instance in which a mainly online community of support needed to mobilize offline support, a task it did not ultimately achieve. It would be unfair to pin Dean’s collapse wholly on the failure of his netroots to branch out, but as Howard Rheingold points out in a comment to the earlier CLO discussion, it is seen as an important factor in Dean’s downfall. But the Dean case illustrates several of the strengths of an online-only model of action (ease of communication, the possibility of building a coherent opinion community in the face of mainstream ambivalence, the low cost of joining such a community for a political novice, and the ease of online fundraising from many small sources). It also introduced at least one important crossover tool (the famous Deen MeetUps), which offered online activists easy transitions to offline organizing, though that tool did not ultimately foster a compelling enough offline presence to reach the party faithful.

Obama’s relative success makes his campaign an attractive counterexample. However, I see Obama’s campaign less as a mirror of Dean’s (originating in the netroots and needing to develop an offline presence), and more as having developed its online and offline actions concurrently. Unlike Dean, Obama had attained major national prominence before his online campaign was in full swing. Today, it benefits from a well-run conventional campaign,solid online-only tools, and what look like a number of crossover tools, both inside and outside the formal campaign (inside there are the networking and event-creating tools; outside are YouTube mashups, Facebook profiles, etc.).

So we should not assume that Obama has succeeded where Dean failed. (The campaign could have its online activists, and its offline activists, and little exchange between the two camps.) Instead, we should look carefully at whom Obama has engaged, how they are engaged, and how they got there. Especially, I’m wondering, is Obama bringing Millennials to conventional, offline political action via web engagement? If so, how? Which tools offer pathways from online, networked and expressive engagement to offline actions? The voting levels of young people seem a good indication this is happening: what other kinds of evidence do we have?

Entry Filed under: conceptions of citizenship, participatory media