The Civic Web

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning

Engineering Play: A Cultural History of Children's Software by Mizuko Ito

Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media by Mizuko Ito, Sonja Baumer, Matteo Bittanti, danah boyd, Rachel Cody, Becky Herr-Stephenson, Heather A. Horst, Patricia G. Lange, Dilan Mahendran, Katynka Martínez, C. J. Pascoe, Dan Perkel, Laura Robinson, Christo Sims, and Lisa Tripp, with contributions by Judd Antin, Megan Finn, Arthur Law, Annie Manion, Sarai Mitnick, David Schlossberg, and Sarita Yardi

The Civic Web: Young People, the Internet and Civic Participation by Shakuntala Banaji and David Buckingham

Inaugural Series Volumes

These edited volumes were created through an interactive community review process and published online and in print in December 2007. They are the precursors to the peer-reviewed monographs in the series.

Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth, edited by W. Lance Bennett

Digital Media, Youth, and Credibility, edited by Miriam J. Metzger and Andrew J. Flanagin

Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected, edited by Tara McPherson

The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning, edited by Katie Salen

Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media, edited by Anna Everett

Youth, Identity, and Digital Media, edited by David Buckingham

The Civic Web

Young People, the Internet and Civic Participation

Shakuntala Banaji and David Buckingham

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2013 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information about special quantity discounts, please email special_sales@mitpress.mit.edu.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Banaji, Shakuntala, 1971–

The civic web : young people, the Internet and civic participation / by Shakuntala Banaji and David Buckingham.

  pages  cm. — (The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation series on digital media and learning)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-262-01964-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Youth—Political activity.  2. Internet and youth.  3. Internet—Political aspects.   I. Buckingham, David, 1954–  II. Title.

HQ799.2.P6B35  2013

004.67′80835—dc23

2013007265

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

d_r0

In memory of Vijayatara, indomitable spirit

Contents

Series Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1  Defining the Issues

2  Researching the Civic Web

3  Producing the Civic Web

4  Young People Online and Offline

5  The Young Civilians

6  Politics Online

7  Making Civic Identities

8  Conclusion

References

Index

Series Foreword

In recent years, digital media and networks have become embedded in our everyday lives and are part of broad-based changes to how we engage in knowledge production, communication, and creative expression. Unlike the early years in the development of computers and computer-based media, digital media are now commonplace and pervasive, having been taken up by a wide range of individuals and institutions in all walks of life. Digital media have escaped the boundaries of professional and formal practice, and the academic, governmental, and industry homes that initially fostered their development. Now they have been taken up by diverse populations and noninstitutionalized practices, including the peer activities of youth. Although specific forms of technology uptake are highly diverse, a generation is growing up in an era where digital media are part of the taken-for-granted social and cultural fabric of learning, play, and social communication.

This book series is founded upon the working hypothesis that those immersed in new digital tools and networks are engaged in an unprecedented exploration of language, games, social interaction, problem solving, and self-directed activity that leads to diverse forms of learning. These diverse forms of learning are reflected in expressions of identity, how individuals express independence and creativity, and in their ability to learn, exercise judgment, and think systematically.

The defining frame for this series is not a particular theoretical or disciplinary approach, nor is it a fixed set of topics. Rather, the series revolves around a constellation of topics investigated from multiple disciplinary and practical frames. The series as a whole looks at the relation between youth, learning, and digital media, but each might deal with only a subset of this constellation. Erecting strict topical boundaries can exclude some of the most important work in the field. For example, restricting the content of the series only to people of a certain age means artificially reifying an age boundary when the phenomenon demands otherwise. This becomes particularly problematic with new forms of online participation where one important outcome is the mixing of participants of different ages. The same goes for digital media, which are increasingly inseparable from analog and earlier media forms.

The series responds to certain changes in our media ecology that have important implications for learning. Specifically, these are new forms of media literacy and changes in the modes of media participation. Digital media are part of a convergence between interactive media (most notably gaming), online networks, and existing media forms. Navigating this media ecology involves a palette of literacies that are being defined through practice but require more scholarly scrutiny before they can be fully incorporated pervasively into educational initiatives. Media literacy involves not only ways of understanding, interpreting, and critiquing media, but also the means for creative and social expression, online search and navigation, and a host of new technical skills. The potential gap in literacies and participation skills creates new challenges for educators who struggle to bridge media engagement inside and outside the classroom.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning, published by the MIT Press, aims to close these gaps and provide innovative ways of thinking about and using new forms of knowledge production, communication, and creative expression.

Acknowledgments

The research discussed in this book was made possible by funding from the European Commission, under the Framework 6 program for Targeted Socioeconomic Research. We owe a huge debt of thanks to the web producers in our seven countries who participated in our research, and also to the young people whose insights and input made the research so interesting. The overall findings discussed in our study are the collective work of seven teams of researchers in the UK, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Hungary, Spain, Turkey, and Sweden. We would like to thank Liesbeth de Block, Eva Bognar, Fadi Hirzalla, Maja Turnšek Hančič, Judit Szakacs, Aleksander Sašo Slaček Brlek, Liesbet van Zoonen, Tobias Olsson, Magdalena Albero-Andres, Peter Dahlgren, Asli Telli Aydemir, Francesco Fabbro, Albert Bastardas, and Fredrik Miegel for their contributions. Some of their individual work is specifically acknowledged in chapters 6 and 7, although the project involved collaboration throughout. While responsibility for the arguments here remains our own, the discussions that took place across our project team contributed in important ways to our synthesis of the data. Our colleague Liesbeth de Block also played a key role in managing the project and in keeping us relatively sane; her insights helped us pay attention to crucial areas of policy and practice in the field.

Introduction

In contemporary Western societies, there is increasing talk of a democratic deficit. Even as we pay lip service to the principles of democracy, it seems that we are becoming less and less engaged in civic life. We are less inclined to vote, join political parties, volunteer or campaign for social causes, or place our trust in the political process. Very few of us appear to be active citizens in any sustained or meaningful way. These problems are often thought to manifest particularly among young people, who are widely described as alienated, apathetic, and disengaged. And if young people are no longer learning to participate in civic and political life, can there be any hope for the future of democracy?

The search for solutions to this problem has led many to look to technology, and specifically to the Internet. Politicians, activists, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), youth workers, and educators have all turned to the Internet as a means of reengaging young people in civil society. The networked, participatory potential of this new technology has been touted as creating new possibilities both for civic learning and for civic action. As well as reinvigorating the work of existing civic and political organizations, it is argued, the Internet affords new forms of interaction, participation, and engagement.

Yet this debate raises several questions. How do we explain young people’s apparent disaffection from traditional forms of politics and civic life? Are young people in fact continuing to participate, but in new and different ways? Can the Internet help revive democratic participation? What counts as participation in the first place? Will technology create new forms of political and civic culture among young people, and how might we recognize these forms? What constraints and obstacles are likely to be encountered in these respects? And how do the possibilities vary across different political cultures and national contexts?

This book is based on an extensive research project that sought to address these questions. It was conducted between 2006 and 2009 and funded under the European Commission’s Framework 6 program for targeted socioeconomic research. The funding of the project itself reflects the wider significance of this issue and its particular relevance to the European project—the desire to create a more active and effective pan-European public sphere. A good deal of the EC’s work in this field has been directed toward young people, not least through the creation of websites, portals, and online networks designed to promote their understanding of European issues and their involvement as active citizens. Ours was one of several EC-funded research projects on related themes, most notably the Demos and EUYOUPART projects, although it was the only one to focus specifically on the Internet (see http://demos.iue.it and http://www.sora.at/index.php?id=44&L=1, respectively).

The project set out to analyze the potential contribution of the Internet to promoting civic engagement and participation among young people aged roughly fifteen to twenty-five years. It focused specifically on the range of youth-oriented civic sites that had begun to emerge on the World Wide Web around the turn of the twenty-first century. Such sites were being created by an increasingly wide range of organizations, from national and local governments, political parties, charities, and NGOs to grassroots campaigners and activist groups. This emerging and somewhat unstable online youth civic sphere had already been documented by Kathryn Montgomery and her colleagues (2004) in the United States, although at that point there had been very little European research.

This was an international project, if not strictly a comparative one. Our research took place in six EU member states and one applicant nation: Hungary, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Turkey. The partner countries were selected on the grounds that they represented very different cultural and political histories, and hence contrasting political systems and forms of civic culture (see chapter 2).

Broadly speaking, the design of our research followed the circuit of culture approach that is widely adopted in cultural studies (see Buckingham 2008; du Gay et al. 1997). We sought to combine and compare data about website producers, texts, and audiences, addressing a common set of research questions across a range of different types of investigation, and to set the data within a broader social and historical context. The research used both quantitative and qualitative methods and focused on three key dimensions of this phenomenon:

• the nature and characteristics of such websites, in terms of their content and formal features (design, mode of address, structure) and the extent to which they invited active participation among their users;

• the production of the sites, including the motivations, working practices, and economic models of the producers; and

• the uses and interpretations made of such sites by different social groups of young people, and the relationship between their online participation and their civic participation offline.

In developing our research project, we adopted a deliberately broad and open conception of civic participation. The kinds of sites and activities we examined included the following:

• initiatives on the part of government (including the EU) or political parties (such as through their youth wings) to secure greater civic participation;

• those based on single-issue campaigns (such as campaigns built around globalization, discrimination, opposition to hunting, or homelessness);

• more open forums, in which young people from particular social groups (the disabled, refugees, gays and lesbians) defined and debated their own agenda of issues;

• sites promoting social activity or participation based on religious beliefs;

• sites encouraging volunteering and social or community activism;

• sites designed for specific ethnic minorities or geographically isolated groups; and

• sites addressing areas that might be seen as problematic, such as political violence or xenophobic hatred.

Such sites are, by definition, noncommercial sites created by private individuals, citizens’ or public interest groups, governments, political parties, NGOs, or other nonprofit agencies. They address a range of concerns, including voting, volunteering, local community involvement, identity politics, global issues, tolerance and diversity, equity, and activism. The nature and availability of such sites vary across European countries, partly reflecting different levels of access to the Internet and partly because of differences in national (as well as regional and local) political cultures. These sites are also diverse in form. Some, such as many of those produced by governments, political parties, or activist groups wary of police surveillance, are relatively inert; they provide little interactivity beyond the mechanical means of online polls and petitions. Others make extensive use of the interactive dimensions of the medium, including message boards, chat facilities, video upload facilities, and even games. Additionally, it is worth noting that our research spanned a period during which online social networking became widespread, and our sample includes websites explicitly modeled on or including aspects of social networking sites.

In exploring this emerging phenomenon, we set out to address a range of empirical questions. How far does participation online result in greater participation offline in civic culture, or do these virtual networks constitute new forms of civic participation in themselves? How far does the model of networked citizenship actually correspond to the everyday practices and motivations of the majority of young people? Are some kinds of young people (for example, as defined in terms of social class, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or culture) more likely to respond to such invitations than others? Are some groups more likely to stay within traditional forms of civic participation or, alternatively, to resist them altogether? What are the social, political, and economic obstacles to such new media initiatives? And how do the answers to these questions vary across the different political cultures of our seven countries?

As well as generating insights for further research, we also sought to identify some of the issues and dilemmas faced by practitioners and policy-makers in relevant fields, and to understand some of the key characteristics of good practice in this field. We also considered how information and communication technologies—and these civic sites in particular—might be used in the context of citizenship education, not least in developing more participatory and self-actualizing approaches to civic learning (see Bennett 2008; Selwyn 2007).

This book is organized around the three key dimensions of our research, outlined above. We look in turn at the organizations that produce this kind of civic content (chapter 3), the young people they seek to address (chapters 4 and 5), and the actual sites or services themselves (chapters 6 and 7). To begin, we provide a more detailed discussion of the broader issues at stake in research related to new media and their potential to increase civic participation among young people.

1

Defining the Issues

By the time we began to write this book, in 2011, the issues our research was concerned with seemed to have taken on much greater urgency. Both authors were involved in the wave of protests that swept through universities in the UK in response to the government’s withdrawal of funding and the consequent tripling of student tuition fees. On one occasion, we were trapped in (different) police kettles on the streets near London’s Houses of Parliament as ranks of officers confined protesters to narrow spaces and then proceeded to ride horses into the crowd. We anxiously texted each other and our friends, who were either enclosed elsewhere in the demonstration or at home watching developments on television or online. During subsequent demonstrations, it became clear that police and protesters were playing a game of digital cat and mouse, tracking each other’s movements using smartphones and surveillance cameras, Twitter and Facebook.

Meanwhile, on the world stage, a controversy erupted as the website Wikileaks published an enormous hoard of confidential memoranda and documents obtained by hacking into government computers (Beckett with Ball 2012). In an increasingly bizarre mix of political intrigue and soap opera, the embarrassment and incrimination that might have followed from the release of this material rapidly disappeared in the scandal surrounding the Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, who was facing extradition from the UK to face charges of sexual assault in Sweden. Much more dramatically, in the spring of 2011, a series of mass demonstrations, strikes, and occupations of public spaces spread across North Africa and the Middle East. Groups of protesters came together to challenge long-running dictatorships, first in Tunisia and Egypt, and then (with much greater struggle and bloodshed) in Syria, Bahrain, and Libya. In the media coverage of what were dubbed the Twitter revolutions or the Facebook revolutions, much was made of the role of technology—and especially of social networking sites—in somehow promoting or even precipitating these dramatic political shifts (see Meijas 2010).

These developments have already generated a considerable amount of academic commentary. However, they need to be set within the wider context of civic and political uses of new media, many of which are more mundane and less spectacular. Thus, while we do describe examples of civic activism, new social movements, and grassroots cultural politics, this book also considers the distinctly worthy and respectable uses of the Internet by governments, charities, and official youth organizations—as well as by established far-right groups and parties. The research on which this book is based focused primarily on what some would now identify as Web 1.0—the network of somewhat less than interactive sites that preceded the advent of social networking and user-generated content sites in the mid-2000s. However, sites of this kind continue to dominate the Web, and have not been superseded by subsequent developments; we are wary in any case of undue rhetorical distinctions between rubrics such as 1.0 and 2.0.

The kinds of dramatic events described above might be (and often have been) put into the service of telling a particular story about the relationships between political and technological change. When we look at the events more closely, however, the story is more diverse and more complex. New media technologies of various kinds were undoubtedly involved, although mobile phones, social networking sites, and computer hacking have very different possibilities and were used in very different ways in the uprisings and social challenges. Conventional media and offline contacts were also critically important in most of these instances: the events were intensively covered by traditional media such as television and newspapers, while leaflets, posters, and word-of-mouth played a key role in informing and mobilizing demonstrators. The genuine and sustained threat to authority in the UK student protests and in the Egyptian uprising—and indeed in more recent events in Greece, Spain, and Portugal—was not posed by tweets or critical postings on Facebook but by the physical presence of large numbers of angry people in the streets and squares in the heart of major cities.

Young people were also, of course, heavily involved, although we were by no means the only participants in the London demonstrations who were well past the bloom of youth. While the mainstream media and the authorities were often keen to represent such events as driven by irresponsible (and even hormonal) adolescents, the protests additionally attracted a much older age cohort, many of whom also enthusiastically tweeted, texted, and consulted the Internet on their smartphones.

These events were obviously and overtly political, not least in that they were directed toward the actions of elected (or nonelected) politicians. For many of the young people whom we met in the London demonstrations, the protests were probably their first experience of political protest, although some might well have participated in the massive (and ultimately ineffective) demonstrations against the Iraq War that took place in the very same streets eight years earlier. Again, however, it is important not to diminish the significant differences between the events of 2003 and 2011 or to pass over the very diverse causes and consequences they may have had—and may yet have in the future.

Nonetheless, the stories about technology, young people, and political change that crop up around such events have become increasingly familiar in recent years. A growing chorus of enthusiasts celebrates the power of technology to regenerate civic, cultural, and political life, to liberate oppressed populations, and to give voice to the marginalized, the exploited, and the excluded (e.g., Benkler 2006; Rheingold 2003; Shirky 2009). This story is, of course, part of the much broader wave of utopian thinking that often accompanies the advent of new media technologies. As historians such as Carolyn Marvin (1988) and Brian Winston (1998) have shown, the kinds of claims currently being made about the Internet echo those that were made in earlier generations about video recording, television, radio, the telephone, and the printing press. And while it has taken some time to emerge, the popular debate about the Internet and digital media is also now seeing a backlash: in the last couple of years, we have seen a new wave of publications that seeks to burst the bubble of technological optimism, arguing that new technologies are trivializing culture and politics, destroying our basic humanity, and undermining the very fabric of social life (e.g., Carr 2010; Keen 2007; Turkle 2011).

Both sides in these debates typically attribute an extraordinary power to technology and account for its role in highly deterministic terms: technology is seen to produce social change, irrespective of how and by whom it is used. Young people as emblems of the future are predictably invoked on both sides of this debate: they are at once the digital natives, whose facility with technology is creating new forms of social and cultural participation (Palfrey and Gasser 2008; Prensky 2001), and the dumbest generation, stupefied and terminally distracted by the flickering screen (Bauerlein 2009). Such arguments tend merely to replay the binary logic that has historically characterized responses to all new technologies (Marvin 1988): either technology will liberate us or it will enslave us; either it will expand our potential or it will reduce us; either it will revitalize our social and cultural life or it will take us all to hell.

Constructing a Problem

Fifteen years ago, one of the present authors sought to address some of these issues by means of an empirical study of young people’s engagement with television, a medium that continues to occupy the bulk of young people’s leisure time. The book that resulted from that research, The Making of Citizens: Young People, News and Politics (Buckingham 2000), began by laying out a debate whose broad terms continue to be rehearsed in both popular and academic discussions in this field (see, e.g., Bennett 2008; Dahlgren 2007; Loader 2007).

On the one hand, there is persistent concern throughout the industrialized world about a perceived crisis in modern democracy. The proportions of people voting in local and national (and indeed Europe-wide) elections have steadily decreased; formal membership of political parties has plummeted; citizens’ interest in and knowledge about social and political affairs are waning; and measures of trust and confidence in politicians and in the political system are at an all-time low (Hetherington 2005; Niemi and Weisberg 2001; Putnam 2000; Whiteley 2009). There have been occasional signs of revival, for instance with the emergence of charismatic political candidates, as in the United States in 2008, or simply with the prospect of closely fought elections, as in the UK in 2010, yet the long-term trend is apparently one of continuing decline.

However, this perceived crisis is not simply about the relationship between citizens and the formal political system. For many commentators there has been a more