strong social support for creating and sharing and for the development of “voice,” informal practices providing mentorship and training for would-be participants, and contributors’ sense that what they share matters. Young men and women who learned how to use their cameras recording skateboarding stunts, to mash up images to make cute cat pictures, or to edit fan videos are now turning their skills toward political speech and grassroots mobilization. These “creative activists” often speak to each other through images borrowed from commercial entertainment but remixed to communicate their own messages; they are often deploying social media platforms, sometimes in ways that challenge corporate interests; and they are forging communities through acts of media circulation.
By Any Media Necessary responds to recent analyses by writers such as Nico Carpentier (2011), Peter Dahlgren (2011), Christopher M. Kelty (2013), and Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Henderson (2013), who have called for more precise distinctions between different models of participation. Delwiche (2013), for example, draws strong links between the kinds of participatory democracy advocated by the counterculture of the 1960s and the forms of participatory culture that emerged in reaction to networked computing. Today’s participatory culture and politics reflects decades of struggles to gain greater control of the means of cultural production and circulation, to free the communication environment from powerful gatekeepers. Yet a range of interests have attached themselves to a rhetoric of participation, which may mask the continuation of old inequalities in how wealth and power are distributed. Kelty writes:
“Participating” in Facebook is not the same thing as participating in a Free Software project, to say nothing of participating in the democratic governance of a state. If there are indeed different “participatory cultures” then the work of explaining their differences must be done by thinking concretely about the practices, tools, ideologies, and technologies that make them up. Participation is about power, and, no matter how “open” a platform is, participation will reach a limit circumscribing power and its distribution. (29)
As we seek to deepen our understanding of participatory politics, we need to be more precise in describing the forms participation takes. Critics of participatory politics often see participation as simply another term for co-optation, implying that participating in a neoliberal economy only empowers corporate forces controlling the pipelines through which these new messages flow (Dean 2005). Rather, we describe participation in terms of the ability to forge a sense of collective voice and efficacy through larger networks that work together to bring about change.
A More Participatory Culture
Participation, as Nico Carpentier (Jenkins and Carpentier 2013) suggests, is a utopian ideal: “There is no end point. It will never be achieved … There will always be struggle, there will always be contestation. There will always be elitist forces trying to make things go back to the old ways” (266). Drawing from Carpentier, we see participation as an aspiration as much as it is a reality, something groups such as those we survey are striving to achieve. Carpentier (2011) makes a productive distinction between what he calls minimalist models of participation where participation is limited in scope and what he calls maximalist models that see participation as playing “a more substantial and continuous role and does not remain restricted to the ‘mere’ election of representatives” (16–17). Here, participation is understood as a matter of degree—few situations match his ideal of maximalist participation.
While Jenkins’s original white paper (Jenkins et al. 2006) used the term “participatory culture,” we will refer to “a more participatory culture” to call attention to those who have not yet acquired the skills and access and who lack the power and status needed to meaningfully participate. A more participatory culture is one where more people have access to the means of cultural production and circulation and one where more key decisions are made with the active and expanded participation of community members. A more participatory culture is not an inevitable outgrowth of technological change; to achieve it will require struggles to broaden access to technological infrastructures and participatory skills, struggles against the corporate ownership and government regulation of communication channels, struggles to retain our collective rights to privacy and to free expression, struggles to be heard and respected by institutional power brokers, and struggles against various forms of segregation and marginalization.
Our research is helping to identify many ways that activist networks have “empowered” young people, especially those who are already culturally engaged, to embrace more active roles as citizens. Many youth are finding their civic voices through projects that encourage them to produce and circulate media. While we see much to celebrate here, we are also concerned about the precariousness of some of these publics, which contend with the same pressures that have disempowered other young people in the past. In a review of the existing literature, Jennifer S. Light (2015) concludes:
Time and again, it seems, when the cost has fallen young people have turned to new media as tools for political expression among themselves and to the broader community of adults. Yet, in keeping with the history of alternative media more generally—for adults, too, have been enthusiastic users—the youth who used media technologies but did not control media systems found traditional gatekeeping authorities—all adults—eager to assert control over and restrict technologies’ future use. (33)
Throughout the book, we consider a range of factors that limit the capacity for participatory politics, including issues of media literacy and civic skills (in the case of Kony 2012), digital access (in the case of the DREAMers), surveillance (in the case of American Muslims), and institutional entanglements (in the case of Students for Liberty). Perhaps most powerfully, we address the range of institutional constraints and ideological blinders—the larger power dynamics around race, gender, sexuality, legal status, or generation that make it hard for young people to meaningfully participate in the political process.
What Does Participatory Politics Look Like?
In a white paper for the MacArthur Youth and Participatory Politics Research Network, Cathy J. Cohen and Joseph Kahne (2012) define participatory politics as “interactive, peer-based acts through which individuals and groups seek to exert both voice and influence on issues of public concern” (vi). This report identified various forms of participatory politics, including the sharing of information through social media, engaging in online conversations through digital forums or blogs and podcasts, creating original content in the form of online videos or photoshopped memes to comment on a current issue, using Twitter and other microblogging tools to rally a community toward collective action, or deploying databases in order to investigate an ongoing concern. Participatory politics represent forms of political participation that are embedded in the everyday life practices of young political agents. Cohen and Kahne explain:
The participatory skills, norms, and networks that develop when social media is used to socialize with friends or to engage with those who share one’s interests can and are being transferred to the political realm.… What makes participatory culture unique is not the existence of these individual acts, but that the shift in the relative prevalence of circulation, collaboration, creation, and connection is changing the cultural context in which people operate. (3)
Joe Kahne, Ellen Middaugh, and Danielle Allen (2014) stress that their “notion of the political extends beyond the electoral focus” to include a “broad array of efforts” that range from “electoral” activities to “lifestyle politics” (1). More specifically, they propose the following activity types as characteristic of participatory politics:
Circulation. In participatory politics, the flow of information is shaped by many in the broader community rather than by a small group of elites.…
Dialogue and feedback. There is a high degree of dialogue among community members, as well as a practice of weighing in on issues of public concern and on the decisions of civic and political leaders.…
Production. Members not only circulate information
