Such sites enable rapid innovation on the level of social formations, personal and collective identities, rhetorics and symbols, and deliberative mechanisms and processes. And networked communication empowers the rapid diffusion of those innovations.1
The American public desperately needs to find ways to make the government work on its behalf, since many of the core issues—such as citizenship rights for undocumented youth or an end to racialized police violence—are questions that involve the relationship between citizens and the state. But many of today’s grassroots organizations believe that the most effective way to put pressure on the government is through the exercise of expressive and discursive power—through education and cultural change—rather than necessarily through the ballot box. In Counter-Democracy, Pierre Rosanvallon (2008) describes the various mechanisms by which citizens in Western democratic countries have sought to hold their governments accountable for working within and preserving the infrastructure of democracy. He argues that new political practices have expanded in response to growing skepticism toward governments and disengagement with institutional forms of politics:
For some time now, political scientists have tried to identify unconventional forms of participation, which may have increased in number as the rate of participation in elections declined. The number of people participating in strikes or demonstrations, signing petitions and expressing collective solidarity in other ways suggests that the age is not one of political apathy and that the notion that people are increasingly withdrawing into the private sphere is not correct. It is better to say that citizenship has changed in nature rather than declined. There has been a simultaneous diversification of the range, forms, and targets of political expression. As political parties eroded, various types of advocacy groups and associations developed. Major institutions of representation and bargaining saw their roles diminish as ad hoc organizations proliferated. Citizens now have many more ways of expressing their grievances and complaints other than voting. (19)
Understanding these new mechanisms of political participation is central to this book’s project.
Ethan Zuckerman (forthcoming) has asked his readers to take a long, hard look at these new mechanisms of political participation in order to better understand their underlying models of change and to assess which may be the most effective means of achieving particular goals: “If I care about racial justice, should I work to elect candidates from a particular political party, run for local office, participate in a march, write an op-ed or a blog post? Given my skills, capabilities and time, am I likely to be effective in bringing about the changes I wish to see through a given civic act?” To address these questions, Zuckerman contrasts the different tactics protestors used in the immediate aftermath of the police shooting of unarmed black teen Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. Zuckerman notes the complex interplay between traditional forms of street protest and social media responses designed to direct greater attention onto what had happened: “The protests in the streets documented online, and the online protests calling attention to events in the streets represent some of the ways in which civic media—the use of participatory media technologies for civic participation, political engagement or social change—has become a routine part of protest movements, opening participation in protests far beyond those physically present.”
Much like Occupy, Ferguson and subsequent protests against racialized police violence have generated new political symbols, tactics, and frames. Anusha Kedhar (2014), for example, has described the ways that the “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot” gesture has been performed not only in the streets of Ferguson but around the world as an expression of solidarity and as a means of embodying a particular subjectivity: “The hands up don’t shoot slogan implores the protestor not only to stand in solidarity with Michael Brown by re-enacting his last movements, but also to empathize by embodying his final corporeal act of agency. As a collective gesture, it compels us to take note of and publicly acknowledge the bodily proof of Michael Brown’s innocence.” Under the hashtag #iftheygunnedmedown, African Americans were encouraged to share contrasting photographs of themselves in different personas—dressed for work or graduation or military service as opposed to more casual street clothes—as a means of calling out how the news media’s selection of such images for publication can dramatically shape the public’s perception of Brown or others involved in police violence. This campaign allowed dispersed supporters to feel connected to the protest, offering a template for what meaningful participation might look like and identifying others who shared a similar worldview. The use of such tactics also reflects a growing awareness of the ways protestors have been able to coalesce and mobilize quickly via social media.2
Zuckerman argues that such social media campaigns often seek to change media representations as a means of shaping public perceptions and social norms. Such a model of change, Zuckerman argues, underlies many efforts to deploy social media because this approach builds upon the social affiliations and cultural practices many young people use on a daily basis. Such campaigns, he suggests, are easy to execute but hard to assess: “It’s one thing to measure how many millions of Facebook users changed their profile photo to the logo of an equality campaign, and another to determine whether those profile changes led to a change in public acceptance of equal marriage rights.” Moreover, such messages risk adding more clutter to an already vast media landscape, as citizens are pulled and tugged by many such efforts.
As we are writing, protests around the U.S. and around the world are escalating amid a growing awareness of a pattern of similar incidents in which black bodies have been subjected to brutal and discriminatory police force. We still do not know how effective these various tactics will be in sustaining an ongoing social justice movement; we also do not know by what criteria we should appraise their effectiveness. Rather than burning out, there are some signs that each of these campaigns has fueled the next (with the #BlackLivesMatter campaign following from the Trayvon Martin death helping to inspire the responses in Ferguson), adding new symbols and gestures to the mix (such as the choking “I can’t breathe” imagery associated with the death of Eric Garner, another black man, caught in a lethal police chokehold), and tapping mounting public frustration and rage. Whether this effort alters police practices or not will depend both on the ability of the mostly young civil rights leaders to transform a series of local causes into the basis for an ongoing movement, and on whether government officials are prepared to acknowledge and respond to these protestors. How do we weigh the impact of public awareness campaigns against the refusal of multiple grand juries to take legal action?
Throughout this book, we will be exploring in what senses these kinds of expressive practices might be politically meaningful, both for those who participate (for whom benefits might include developing their voices and skills as citizens) and for those who receive such messages (for whom benefits might include gaining access to alternative perspectives to those represented through more mainstream media channels). We also will call attention to some of the risks and limits of these particular tactics, and the model of change that inform them, as we sort through this underlying tension among an increasingly unresponsive government, a public with an expanded communicative capacity, and an emerging generation seeking to change the world.
A Crisis in Youth Participation?
In this book, the term “youth” refers to people in their teens or twenties. It defines not simply a stage of physiological or psychological development, but also a stage in the process of acquiring the skills necessary for political participation at an age where there is less than complete access to the rights of citizenship. This group includes high school students, who may not yet be eligible to vote, and college students and young adults, who do not yet have the right to run for many elective offices. That said, we regard the political work these young people are doing not simply as preparatory for adult roles but also meaningful on its own terms as an intervention into core debates of our time. We find that young people sometimes begin getting involved with these causes in their high school years and may be providing organizational leadership by their late twenties, suggesting a kind of ecology of participation that was important to capture through our research. The idea that people in this category have a distinct political identity is evoked by the popular 1960s slogan “Don’t trust anyone
