about youth that dismiss young people for not embracing what older people see as appropriate forms of civic and political participation.
While our focus here is on youth, keep in mind that some of the organizations we study allow for cross-generational participation around shared interests and common goals. Also, we are looking at networks of young people who are coming of age at a particular historical, cultural, and technological juncture, and our analysis deals with their current political and civic lives, rather than some universalized notion of child development or idea of a generational identity that will remain fixed throughout the rest of their lives. We do not know what kinds of political lives these people will lead as they grow older, so our focus is on what they are doing now and not what kind of people they are becoming.
Youth are often seen as emblematic of the crisis in democracy—represented as apathetic about institutional politics, ill-informed about current affairs, and unwilling to register and vote. Peter Levine (2006) identifies a number of flaws in this narrative:
The narrative of decline overlooks creative developments, often led by youth, that may be building the foundations of civil society in the twenty-first century.… The decline story overlooks that various subpopulations engage on issues of special concern to them.… It overlooks certain positive trends in youth engagement, such as a steep rise in volunteering rate in the United States.… It treats a withdrawal from major institutions (such as elections and the press) as a decline, when these trends may actually reflect growing sophistication. Perhaps youth are deliberately and wisely choosing not to endorse forms of participation that are flawed. (15)
In short, Levine suggests, youth may be pursuing politics through different means than have historically been acknowledged within research on institutional politics or social movements. Scholars need new approaches for studying American public life, approaches that acknowledge and work past the core contradiction between dysfunctional governance and the public’s expanded expressive capacity. Melissa Brough and Sangita Shresthova (2012) explain this point of view:
Over the last several decades, younger generations in particular have become civically and politically engaged in new and different ways, related less to electoral politics or government or civic organizations and more to personal interests, social networks, and cultural or commodity activism (a form of protest that is typically levied against private companies rather than governments). These modes of political participation are often enacted through informal, noninstitutionalized, nonhierarchical networks in and around the Internet (Bennett 2008[b]; Ito et al. 2009; Jenkins et al. 2006; Kahne, [Lee, and Feezell] 2011). They are political insofar as they aim to influence or change existing power relations.
Many American youth are making calculated choices that they may be more effective at bringing about change through educational or cultural mechanisms than through electoral or institutional means and through a consensus rather than partisan approach—addressing social problems on levels where voluntary actions can make a difference. Such a response is not irrational. Over the last two presidential cycles, there have been dramatic increases in voting by youth, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, American Muslims, and a range of other groups, which is often cited as a key factor in Obama’s victories. However, these shifts in political engagement have not translated into much congressional action on behalf of the issues that matter most to these constituencies. What progress has been made has occurred through executive decree, court decisions, or shifting public attitudes.
W. Lance Bennett (2008a) talks about some of these shifts in terms of “the empowerment of youth as expressive individuals” (2). Here, though, we want to stress their collective—rather than individual—dimensions. As Castells (2012) suggests, political change is being forged through social and political networks that come together online and in physical space to explore new possibilities. We discuss those shifts from a perspective of cautious optimism. We want to document these new cultural mechanisms for political change: how they are working in practice for particular youth involved within specific organizations and how these practices may be forcing us to rethink what “counts” as politics. While we are skeptical of change occurring in the short term through the mechanisms of institutional politics, we are intrigued by political, social, and cultural changes occurring around the edges of the dominant institutions, as young people work together to address issues that matter to them.
Mainstream journalism has tended to dismiss these new kinds of tactics as “clicktivism,” but the central thesis of this book is that there is something bigger going on here that cannot be described in relation to a single platform. These young people are seeking to change the world through any media necessary. For Occupy, for instance, this meant connecting their struggle to everything from V for Vendetta (Guy Fawkes masks) to Sesame Street (“99 percent of the world’s cookies go to 1 percent of the monsters”) and translating those messages into “memes,” documentary videos, public projections, street theater, and body art, among many other media practices. But the highly visible activities of Occupy are simply the tip of the iceberg, reflecting a much broader array of youth-driven movements actively promoting political change.
Meme from Occupy Wall Street movement.
We do not mean to imply that all young people are a uniform group of so-called digital natives, equally comfortable with the possibilities of using networked communications to spread their messages. We share the concerns danah boyd (2012) raises when she writes that the Kony 2012 campaign illustrates inequalities in the current communication context: “The fact that privileged folks—including white American youth—can spread messages like this is wonderful, but my hunch is that they’re structurally positioned to spread information farther and wider than those who are socially marginalized.” Such systemic and structural inequalities remain a real limit to this emerging style of politics, even as new media tactics are also deployed by American Muslims or undocumented immigrants, youth who are more “socially marginalized.” In our work, we’ve discovered young activists who have overcome enormous difficulties in gaining access to the means of cultural production and circulation: from bloggers who did not own their own computers to filmmakers who did not own their own cameras and who relied on community centers and public libraries for digital access. Some groups have easy access to the skills, knowledge, resources, and social connections that enable them to exert their voice into public affairs in a way that is meaningful and effective. Others—especially many of those economically deprived, socially marginalized, historically disempowered—do not.
Who We Are
In 2009 the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation established the multidisciplinary Youth and Participatory Politics (YPP) Research Network, focused on better understanding these issues. This YPP network, led by Joseph Kahne (Mills College), was part of the foundation’s digital media and learning initiatives, which have resulted in a wide array of white papers, reports, and book-length publications—as well as an international conference, launched in 2010, which annually attracts more than 1,200 participants. The YPP network’s efforts includes a large-scale quantitative survey, conducted by Joseph Kahne and Cathy J. Cohen, documenting the political lives of American youth with a strong emphasis on the quantity, quality, and equality of their new media practices, as well as more qualitative efforts to understand different forms of political participation. Network participants also include Danielle Allen (who has edited a collection of essays reexamining the ways the internet has impacted classic understandings of publics and counterpublics), Howard Gardner (whose Good Participation project has been interviewing young people who are involved in traditional political organizations and volunteer service organizations), Jennifer Earl (who has been documenting new forms of protests and online petitions), Lissa Soep (who has been exploring the platforms and practices that might help young people become more involved in participatory politics), Elyse Eidman-Aadahl (who has been engaging educators as they think through new forms of civics and writing instruction that may help young people discover their political voice), and Ethan Zuckerman (who has been
