The Center for Communication and Civic Engagement has just released a new report that catalogs and describes many of the most prominent youth civic engagement resources on the web. It is crucial for civic practitioners and scholars to be aware of the wide range of online projects dedicated to youth engagement, and the purpose of this report is to contribute to that goal. We gratefully acknowledge the Surdna Foundation Digital Advocacy Skills project for sponsoring this project, which was researched and compiled by Becoming Citizens interns under the direction of Scott Brekke Davis.
The Puget Sound Off (PSO) web site — a joint project of the University of Washington’s Center for Communication and Civic Engagement, the YMCA of Seattle, and the City of Seattle — focuses on promoting and facilitating youth civic engagement.
Recently, PugetSoundOff.org won an award from the Public Technology Institute (PTI) for best web and e-government services. The CCCE has worked with the City of Seattle Department of Information Technology and the Seattle Metrocenter YMCA to develop the Puget Sound Off website, curricula, and project partnerships in the community. An array of Seattle youth organizations, including teams at Youth Media Institute, Rainier Vista Neighborhood House and Horn of Africa Services have led the use of the site developing online groups and posting video, blogs, photos and more. The Mayors Youth Council and the City’s Citizens Telecommunications and Technology Advisory Board have also helped in developing the project.
This award recognizes the unique opportunity Puget Sound Off provides for online youth expression and civic engagement. PSO provides area teens with a community networking and online engagement site, together with on-the-ground training in media literacy, cause related journalism and content development. The site also features tips for online safety and a Flash-based curriculum on digital communication skills, which the CCCE has been instrumental in developing through the Surdna Digital Youth Advocacy Skills program. This CCCE curricula has been packaged on the “how to” section of the PSO site in a library of interactive videos to help youth master blogging, digital storytelling, and other multimedia skills.
Many of these curriculum videos were created by undergraduate interns and graduate students participating in the CCCE’s Becoming Citizens Program. The content of these curricula have been informed by CCCE research on digital media and civic learning, supported by the MacArthur Foundation.
Though aimed at connecting Puget Sound-area youth, PSO is regularly being explored by a worldwide audience, with a clear plurality of hits originating from Seattle. The information about who is visiting PSO and where the users are located comes from Google Analytics, a popular web site tracking service that reports a number of statistics about a site’s visitors—where they visited from, which links they followed to reach the site, what pages they visited, and more. We began using Google Analytics to record PSO’s visitor data on February 27, 2009, and here are a few web traffic highlights from the period between then and June 19, 2009:
General
PSO has accumulated 16,744 “visits” in all, which are defined as site use sessions delineated by at least 30 minutes of inactivity. This works out to roughly 148 visits per day, though they are not evenly distributed—traffic tends to dip slightly on the weekends.
These visits produced 93,194 “pageviews,” which count the number of pages a person views in a single visit. The average number of pages viewed per visit was 5.57, indicating that many visitors are deeply engaged with the site.
Location
A majority (53%) of all visitors come from the Seattle metropolitan area and Puget Sound region. 56% of all visits originated from Washington state, 30% came from US states other than Washington, and 14% came from outside the US.
Eight out of the top ten visitor-producing cities are located in the Puget Sound area. The other two are New York City (#4) and Los Angeles (#10).
PSO is a truly global site, having hosted visitors from 108 countries spanning every continent except Antarctica over the past 2.5 months alone.
PSO is big both at home and at school: the top two ISPs sending visitors are the Seattle Public Schools and Comcast (many of which are undoubtedly home users).
Traffic Sources
Roughly equal shares of traffic (totaling 78%) come from search engines and “direct” visits, in which visitors either type the URL in manually or have PSO bookmarked. Many keywords in searches were clearly civic in nature, such as “should the death penalty be legal” (#7), “affirmative action pro” (#11), and “difference between free trade and fair trade” (#16).
Clearly, PSO is having a powerful impact both within the Puget Sound and beyond. We anticipate these encouraging traffic trends to continue as word about the site spreads. Visit PTI for more information on the PTI competition and PugetSoundOff blogs to see an array of new blog posts, video and images on what youth are sounding off about today.
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?
The Rock the Vote site within the Xbox Live network has downloadable Gamerpics, which can be added to an individual’s Xbox Live profile, in support of Barrack [sic] Obama or John McCain, the presumptive Democratic and Republican nominees, respectively. There’s also voter registration information and Rock the Vote videos.
Banner ads on the Dashboard — the central hub of Xbox Live — will point people toward the Rock the Vote content. After downloading the “I registered” pic, members will get voter registration information via e-mail.
“Hurricane Katrina: Tempest in Crescent City” is a comprehensive social networking website featuring an educational “game” experience where participants are encouraged to act in support of New Orleans residents. The site provides links to a variety of relief groups as well as information about New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina including multiple timelines, analysis of media coverage, and supporting articles for all information presented.
In their first joint appearance since the party conventions, presidential nominees John McCain and Barack Obama will discuss service and civic engagement in the post-9/11, post-Katrina world during the primetime televised “ServiceNation Presidential Candidates Forum” on the evening of Thursday, Sept. 11, hosted by Columbia University in the City of New York, as part of the ServiceNation Summit.
CLO has just released a new short report outlining an evaluative framework for civic curricula based on the learning categories developed in our previous report, Young Citizens and Civic Learning. Here is the abstract:
This report introduces the work of the Civic Learning Online Project in developing digital media learning tools. The need for identifying specific online learning goals and opportunities is discussed first. This is followed by the introduction of an online curriculum unit, Blogging in Public, which is evaluated in terms of the civic learning opportunities it offers.
After perusing this report, we would appreciate your input on the following questions, as well as any general feedback:
Do you see any major categories of civic learning which our evaluative framework would exclude? If so, what?
Do you think civic practitioners are likely to find our framework useful? What can we do to make it more useful for them?
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.
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?
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.)
In my last post, I discussed key YouTube videos about Barack Obama. In this post, I will be discussing some of Hillary Clinton’s videos.
Hillary Clinton has been much less active on YouTube than Barack Obama. However, there have been some very notable videos posted both by her and by others outside of her campaign. This video is one her campaign released as a commercial before the Texas primary. It received a large amount of media attention and was considered very controversial. The video is called “Children,” and has received 960,000 views as of the posting of this blog, making it the most viewed video Hillary Clinton has posted.
The next video was released in March 2007, making it one of the first viral videos of the 2008 election cycle. This famous mashup combines Apple Computer’s 1984 Super Bowl commercial with one of Hillary Clinton’s speeches in an attempt to paint her as “Big Brother.” The video, titled “Think Different,” has witnessed over 5 million views to date.
This last video is an example of how YouTube can amplify the media echo chamber. In late March, Hillary Clinton was caught exaggerating about sniper fire she encountered during a trip to Bosnia while she was the First Lady. Users of YouTube were quick to post news clips about the gaffe, which quickly spread throughout the internet. This video currently has over 1 million views.
YouTube has rapidly become one of the most popular sites on the internet. The ease in which individuals can upload and share video has allowed citizens to share views and ideas with unprecedented ease. Additionally, individuals have greater access to information being spread by sources they may not have seen before. Both individuals and candidates have been using YouTube extensively for the 2008 presidential election. This medium is particularly effective in getting information out to younger citizens, who may not pay attention to traditional news sources, but spend a good amount of time on YouTube. In a series of blog posts, I will be exploring some of the more popular videos being uploaded and discuss the impact they might have on young Americans.
The candidate most involved with YouTube is Senator Barack Obama. Obama has been posting far more videos than other candidates and has had some very popular videos posted about him. While there are certainly many factors involved with Obama’s ability to energize young voters, his campaign’s competence with social media has certainly boosted his numbers in this traditionally apathetic constituency.
One of the most entertaining videos that came out last summer was this one, named “Crush on Obama.” While the video is clearly a joke, it brings out Obama’s youth and good looks, which are both assets in a presidential election. This video currently has over 8 million views.
This next video is titled “Yes We Can.” Created by will.i.am of The Black Eyed Peas, this video features a star cast in an inspirational song mirroring one of Barack Obama’s speeches. As of the time of this post, it has been viewed over 14 million times.
This final video is an example of how Obama has used YouTube to respond to widespread criticism. In this case, Obama was attacked because of a clip of his Pastor, Reverend Wright. This now famous speech given on March 18th in Philadelphia has over 5 million views.
Next week I’ll be exploring some of Hillary Clinton’s more famous videos.
