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Photo from Noor Tagouri’s campaign to become a hijab-wearing anchor on commercial television.
Writing about a 1957 news photograph showing white citizens jeering at black students as they attempted to enter a once segregated school, Danielle Allen (2006) tells us:
The photo forced a choice on its U.S. viewers, and its power to engage the imagination lay in this. The picture simultaneously recorded a nightmarish version of a town meeting and, by presenting to a broad public the visible structure of segregation, elicited throughout the citizenry an epiphantic awareness of the inner workings of public life and made those mechanics the subject of debate. (5)
Noor’s video does similar work, enabling us to envision, discuss, debate, and struggle to achieve other possibilities. Allen argues, “As democracy develops an explanation of how its citizenry is a coherent body, ‘the people,’ and makes this body imaginable, it also invents customs and practices of citizenly interaction that accord with that explanation” (17). In short, changing how the American public imagines democracy may be a key first step toward altering how Americans perceive and treat each other, essential if undocumented or American Muslim youth are going to be embraced within “we the people.” The photograph of Noor in her hijab sitting in a network anchor’s chair called attention to the absence of American Muslims within the mainstream media, while also promoting the young woman’s aspiration to someday enter the media on a more equal basis. The photograph Allen discusses became part of the shared political culture through its circulation via mass media; other young activists have similarly used social networking platforms to heighten the visibility of their own creative works.
Imagining Communities
Benedict Anderson (1983) used the term “imagined community” to describe one of the core mechanisms shaping strong nationalist movements in the 19th and 20th centuries; people across the British empire read the Times of London, and through this shared experience and through the ways that the newspaper articulated a common agenda, they were able to connect diverse everyday experiences to a larger project of empire building. Today, the term “imagining communities” might be more productive. Young people are not simply accepting an agenda constructed by mass media for their consumption, rather they are actively co-constructing the contents of the civic imagination through networked communications. They are building a group identity that might fuel their campaigns and, within those campaigns, they are developing ways of expressing their shared visions for what a better society might look like. Such exchanges may occur at all levels—from the hyperlocal to the transnational, from friendship circles to social movements and formal organizations—yet imagining is an activity, something produced and not simply consumed.
In Anderson’s classic formulation, these communities were imagined because they consisted of massive numbers of people who would never meet each other face to face but somehow felt connected to each other; the same would be true for today’s imagining communities, except that in the context of a many-to-many networked communications system, the potential for direct contact between participants is different from what could have been achieved among the readers of the Times. Ethan Zuckerman (2013c) has noted the many ways that contemporary participants in the online world fail to realize its more cosmopolitan potentials, and fail to reach out to people from different backgrounds than their own, yet there is still a greater opportunity for such interactions than could be facilitated through print culture.
We are speaking here of the civic imagination rather than the public imagination or the political imagination for several reasons. The public imagination emphasizes the social structure—envisioned as a public or counterpublic—from which these acts of imagining arise, while we see these young people involved in something more fluid, a good deal less rationalized than the way the public sphere has traditionally been conceived. Peter Dahlgren (2009) tells us:
The civic resonates with the notion of public, in the sense of being visible, relevant for, and in some ways accessible to many people that is, situated outside the private, intimate domain. “Civic” carries the implication of engagement in public life—a cornerstone of democracy. Interestingly, the civic also signifies the public good. It conveys a sense of the altruistic, a kind of “service,” doing good for others, such as volunteer work.… The civic is thus a precondition for the political, in the sense that it situates us within the realm of the public. (58)
We are describing as “civic” those practices that are designed to improve the quality of life and strengthen social ties within a community, whether defined in geographically local or dispersed terms. Some of these acts of imagining are closely linked to various forms of institutional politics, seeking to advocate changes that can be achieved only through governmental action.
Adorable Care Act meme.
For example, the Adorable Care Act was an effort to educate the public about the national healthcare policy often called “Obamacare” through the creation of memes that linked policy concerns with images of cute animals, designed to be circulated through social media platforms. In other cases (as we’ve already suggested) activist groups have sought change through different means—for example, fighting back over terms of service on Web 2.0 platforms that restrict their expressive freedom or promoting change through education (as will be discussed in relation to the “second-wave” libertarians).
Christina Evans (2015), another member of the YPP network team, has been using the term “digital civic imagination” in a somewhat different but closely related sense—to refer to the ways that young people are (or are not) able to reconceptualize the social media practices they use in their everyday lives into tactics they might deploy as citizens. Through interviews with young people in Oakland, Chicago, and rural North Carolina, Evans found that young people often need help to translate skills they acquired in their social and recreational use of media toward political ends, and she considers what roles educators might play in that process. Our work can be understood as helping to map the trajectory from participatory culture to participatory politics.
Making the Leap: From Participatory Culture to Participatory Politics
Our book’s focus is not on new technologies per se, but on the possibilities (real and imagined) that we might use these tools to achieve greater political participation. Many initially acquired the skills and accessed infrastructures supporting this activism through cultural, rather than overtly political, activities that have become more widespread in the everyday experiences of American youth. To be clear, the cultural is always already (at least implicitly) political, but our focus here is on the ways that cultural practices are being deployed toward explicitly political ends. We are not walking away from decade-long debates about whether appropriation and remix practices may have political effects in terms of allowing us to reimagine gender and sexual identities in the case of slash fan fiction, allowing us a momentary escape from the control of regulatory structures (as in for example, discussions of Beatlemania in Ehrenreich et al. 1997), or inspiring struggles over intellectual property law constraints on political speech (as in the case of the Organization for Transformative Works.) Yet there have always been those who argued that such practices did not constitute “real politics,” which—in their eyes—involved mobilization, voting, petitioning, protest, and labor organizing. This book is thus taking up the challenge of mapping some of the points of contact between cultural and institutional models of politics and we are starting by charting the interplay between participatory culture and participatory politics.
Participatory culture describes a diverse set of shared activities and social engagements, ranging from fan fiction writing and crafting to gaming, through which people collectively carve out a space for expression and learning. Describing the educational dimensions of participatory culture, Henry Jenkins et al. (2006) stress that groups involved in such
