look like. Transmedia mobilization is unstable and fluid, shifting tactically in response to changing conditions on the ground. It is highly responsive to the uneven access that participants have to different media platforms, tools, and channels.
The groups we discuss are differentially situated in terms of their embrace of different media tactics and strategies and of their openness to bottom-up participation in shaping their messages and their circulation. Invisible Children, for example, has a fairly rigidly structured organization; authorized leaders make many key decisions that define IC’s vision and its core tactics. IC actively recruits new members into local chapters that maintain some autonomy from the parent organization. IC actively trains youth leadership to support their activities through summer camps, internships, and local events. And many of these local chapters are affiliated with schools and universities, on the one hand, or churches, on the other (Brough 2012). IC’s media production remains tightly controlled, though there has sometimes been a limited interest in encouraging DIY video-making practices. IC represents transmedia mobilization with a limited model of youth participation but with stronger emphasis on the cultural and social dimensions of politics than a traditional nonprofit might have. IC’s Kony 2012 video circulated via the dispersed network of supporters it had built up over almost ten years of organizing on the ground.
IC also demonstrates some of the challenges of maintaining a networked organization. As the organization received pushback from other human rights groups, it faced a leadership crisis. IC spokesperson Jason Russell had a highly publicized breakdown and the other national leaders—his longtime friends—circled the wagons. A new generation of leaders stepped up behind the scenes and shaped IC’s response, but it took them a few days to regroup. This delayed response left the more loosely affiliated network members exposed. IC was too centralized and not sufficiently participatory, and knowledge was not adequately dispersed across the network. Ironically—as we discuss in Chapter 2—in the wake of Kony 2012, the organization became more centralized to maximize control over its messaging rather than maximize participation.
Compare IC with the DREAMer movement (see Chapter 5). The traditional U.S. immigrant rights movement has had elements of both grassroots and institutional mobilization, but it has largely been tied to institutions like labor unions, the Democratic Party, and a range of nonprofit organizations. The traditional movement tends to break down according to ethnic or national boundaries, to be geographically localized, to maintain tight control over its messaging, and to rely on the ethnic media—radio personalities in the case of the Spanish-language communities in Los Angeles (Costanza-Chock 2010). The DREAMer movement marks a shift away from many of these formalized structures. Youth are connecting across nationality and across geographic location through their capacity to mobilize via social media. DREAMers have a dispersed capacity for media production: any participant can—in theory—create and share videos, and, as a consequence, there is much less control over messaging. These less hierarchical structures allow the DREAMer network enormous flexibility to respond to changing conditions (Zimmerman 2012), especially when the struggle shifted from passing a proposed federal law to supporting a series of local and state initiatives. The DREAMers’ network could spread knowledge from any point to any other point. Leaders emerged organically, and there was not a fixed or hierarchical structure that might overrule local innovation. Critics, on the other hand, of such networked organizations often stress the fragmentation or incoherence of their messaging, suggesting that such tactics make it hard for institutional players to identify and respond to their collective concerns. At the same time, the DREAMers still benefited from training and support from more formal organizations.
Dreaming Alternative Tomorrows: The Civic Imagination
Speaking at the 2008 Harvard graduation, J. K. Rowling told a generation of young students who had come of age reading her books, “We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.” Neither a generic celebration of the human creative capacity nor a simple defense of bedtime stories, Rowling’s talk described how her earlier experiences working with Amnesty International shaped the Harry Potter books. Linking imagination to empathy, she called out those who refuse to expand their vision: “They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know” (Rowling 2008). As Chapter 3 discusses, Rowling’s “Imagine Better” concept inspired the Harry Potter Alliance’s efforts to forge common cause with various other fandoms.
Rowling’s call to “imagine better” could describe a range of movements that are embracing “a politics that understands desire and speaks to the irrational; a politics that employs symbols and associations; a politics that tells good stories” (Duncombe 2007, 9). Liesbet van Zoonen (2005) has similarly questioned the divide between the affective commitments of fans and the cognitive processes associated with active citizenship: “Pleasure, fantasy, love, immersion, play, or impersonations are not concepts easily reconciled with civic virtues such as knowledge, rationality, detachment, learnedness, or leadership” (63). As a consequence, there has historically been a tendency to devalue the role of imagination within the sphere of politics.
As we’ve pursued this work, we’ve increasingly been drawn toward the concept of the “civic imagination,” which we define as the capacity to imagine alternatives to current social, political, or economic institutions or problems. Put bluntly, one cannot change the world unless one can imagine what a better world might look like. Too often, our focus on contemporary problems makes it impossible to see beyond immediate constraints and develop a clearer sense of what might be achieved. One also can’t change the world until one can imagine oneself as an active political agent. For many of the young people we spoke with, the message they received on a daily basis was that what they had to say didn’t matter. These social change organizations work hard to help them learn to trust their own voice. And for some of these young activists—especially those who come from privileged backgrounds—the development of the ability to imagine and feel empathy for others who are living under different conditions is a key stage in their political awakening.
There is no doubt a utopian dimension of this civic imagination—some of what these youth imagine is impossible to achieve. But, as with other utopian models of the past, there is a value in articulating one’s goals and ideals, using them as a yardstick against which to measure current conditions and identifying factors that might block the realization of those “dreams.” Of course, not everyone’s dreams come true, and there is a negative flipside to the civic imagination, which has to do with disappointment, frustration, disillusionment, and rage that may also spark political protest. Here, too, critical discourses—even at their most dystopian moments—often depend on an implicit set of ideals about how power should be distributed. Writing about the “Hands up! Don’t Shoot!” gesture, Kedhar (2014) describes the ways that such street theater or as she prefers, street dancing “can transform a space of control, in which their movements are restricted, into a space of freedom, in which their movements are defiant, bold, and empowered, a space in which they have the ability to move freely.”
We are not unique in emphasizing the place of imagination in fomenting social and political change. The term “political imagination” often refers to the ways individuals perceive and understand the political world (Adelson 1971). “Imagination” is used here in the sense of forming a mental image of something that is abstract. But such theories of the “political imagination” may have overlooked the potential role of “imagination” in its additional sense: contemplating things that are not real, or forming a picture in your mind of something you have not seen or experienced. For youth, this focus on potential civic roles is important since, as writers like Shakuntala Banaji and David Buckingham (2013) suggest, young people are often excluded from playing an “actual” or “meaningful” role in the processes associated with institutionalized politics. Their agendas are marginalized, and often, as with the current voter suppression efforts that make it harder for American youth to
