participating online but also the concrete limits around civic and political participation for young people, particularly those who have not reached voting age; many potentially meaningful connections are not fully realized because young people need adult support to fully pursue their emerging interests.
Participating in What?
Across this book, our focus is primarily on new and innovative political networks, which are choosing tactics and rhetorics that respond to the popular desire for meaningful participation. We are describing the mechanisms through which participants are struggling to achieve greater equality in their capacity to exert voice and influence within decision-making processes that will determine our collective futures. When critical theory is framed in a language of resistance, readers pretty much know what it is “the people” are resisting—neoliberalism, racism, homophobia, patriarchy, militarism, and so on. When the conversation turns to participation, theorists are forced to think about what is being built, what a more ideal society might look like, and the real-world roadblocks that make it difficult to achieve maximized forms of participation. Again and again, such discussions must return to the core question: Participating in what?
As researchers debate what kinds of spaces offer opportunities for meaningful participation, Carpentier (Jenkins and Carpentier 2013) proposes a productive distinction between “participating in” and “participating through” media. So, for example, while one is free to submit a wide array of videos through YouTube, the governance of that platform is controlled by its corporate owner, Google. No one can claim to be a citizen of YouTube, which is run for profit and not for the collective welfare. Unlike, for example, Hogwarts at Ravelry, the comments section on YouTube is notoriously uncivic, a space known for harsh and hateful posts, often directed by dominant groups against any and all forms of minority expression. Yet one study (Thorson et al. 2013) identifies thousands of videos posted by the Occupy movement on YouTube, videos that often challenged corporate interests and circulated at a range of scales from the hyperlocal to the global. Groups such as those involved in Occupy have forged strong political movements in part as a consequence of the ways they communicate with each other through YouTube, but they have remained at the mercy of the corporate interests that decide how free expression will be limited within this platform.
A distinction similar to the one just described can be drawn between participation within grassroots organizations that advocate for change and participation within the governance of the society. Young people are experimenting within participatory structures within their social and recreational lives, bringing some of those structures to the work they are doing as political agents. But these structures are not necessarily accepted within established political institutions and thus do not always influence public policy. We return to this question of what counts as politics in the book’s conclusion. Some young people are ambivalent about whether some of the projects we will discuss should be understood as political as opposed to purely cultural and educational. We wanted to flag the issue here as it is important to recognize that more work must be done before American democratic structures are going to be as fully and meaningfully participatory as many might desire.
Carpentier (Jenkins and Carpentier 2013) insists that for processes to be truly participatory, there must be equality and reciprocity between participants, a standard not fully met by every organization we discuss, let alone by the commercial platforms they use to pursue their goals. Yet the rhetoric of participation raises expectations about how power should be distributed—expectations that are expressed through struggles over terms of service—but also through the formation of alternative media networks that allow participants greater control over what happens to their materials. And we will see in Chapter 6, some groups opt out of traditional civic practices, such as voting, because they see them as less effective at promoting desired political changes than approaches emphasizing educational outreach and cultural change.
We will be especially interested in the roles organizations and networks play in fostering participatory politics. Young people often describe the language within which Americans conduct institutionalized politics as exclusive (in that you have to already be immersed in the system to understand what’s being said) and repulsive (in that the sharply partisan tone of current discourse turns politics into something that is divisive and disgusting). Ethan Zuckerman (2013b) argues that young people are turning to participatory politics because they see a failure in more traditional civic institutions and practices: “Here’s an ugly, but plausible, explanation for the shifting engagement in civics: It’s not that people aren’t interested in civics. They’re simply not interested in feeling ineffectual or helpless.” By contrast, the groups we study invite participation. They have strong incentives to recruit new members and to maintain the continued involvement of existing members. Members “care” about the issues, they “care” about their communities, and they “care” about their own identities as citizens. Such networks offer participants collective frames that can intensify individual members’ desires to make a difference (Kligler-Vilenchik et al. 2012).
These groups map ways in which individual participation can add up to something larger. They direct attention to specific issues and propose ways that people can work together to bring about change. They train members to produce their own media and tell their own stories. They offer networks through which this media can circulate and reach an engaged and appreciative audience. Above all, they create a context where “talking politics” is a normal, ongoing part of the group’s social interactions. Ethan Zuckerman (2013b) asks, “If civics is driven by passionate participation, how do we create a deliberative public space?” The answer may be to make civic and political discussions part of our everyday interactions with our friends and family, something sociologist Nina Eliasoph (1998) suggests is relatively rare; typically, people avoid discussing politics with people that matter to them because they seek to avoid conflict.
Robert Putnam (2000) famously described civic organizations—in his example, bowling leagues—as providing such a context for civic and political exchanges in midcentury America. Insofar as these new forms of participatory politics interject political messages into the same platforms young people use to share cute cat pictures, they also open a space where political deliberation becomes normative. Some may dismiss the idea that new political discourse might, for example, emerge from fan communities or gaming guilds, but keep in mind that Putnam’s bowling leagues were themselves sites of play—not serious in their goals, but nevertheless constituting shared spaces where publics could be formed, ties could be strengthened, and political values could be articulated. The YPP network’s large national survey has found that those people who engage in interest-driven networks online are five times as likely as those who aren’t involved to engage in participatory politics practices and nearly four times as likely to participate in forms of institutional practices. Such online communities may be as much a predictor of civic participation as traditional afterschool clubs such as newspaper, debate, or student government or service learning and community volunteering.
That said, if such groups are helping to facilitate the transition from participatory culture to participatory politics, they still are not as fully democratic as their participants might imagine. Neta Kligler-Vilenchik (2014) argues that not every kind of political conversation can occur within every cultural space: she has shown, for example, that the Nerdfighters have not been nearly as comfortable or as open with discussions of racial diversity and inequality as they have been in fostering discussions around sexual and gender identity politics, often falling back on the much-disputed idea of a “post-racial society” as a way of shutting out rather than opening up discussions about the role race plays in the lives of its participants. When social affiliation is less constrained by physical geography, participants may be drawn to different communities because of what they allow them to talk about. So while the civic imagination may perform some bridging functions in enabling messages to travel from one community to another, it may also enable some forms of exclusion, given that some popular representations are more accessible and more transparent to particular groups.
Peter Dahlgren (2003) has proposed a set of criteria by which we might assess the viability of civic culture. For democratic models of participation
