at a distance. Such systems must support, on the one hand, delivery of information about the desires of individuals (collected in various ways) to a centralized location where they can be collected and considered by empowered representatives, and, on the other hand, delivery of the decisions of the representatives back to the people for action. Depending on the physical distribution of the polity, such communications were conducted on a time scale of weeks and months. But, in the contemporary period, communication technology has changed these processes considerably. The advent of the telegraph and telephone reduced the time scale for information transfer to mere seconds. The advent of social media has now reduced the time scale for transfer of information among members of a community, and between municipal or government representatives and their polities, to instantaneous.
In the West, with the advent of a proto-democratic tradition in ancient Greece came an official space for political discourse: the Agora. In the agoras of Greek city-states, citizens—a class largely limited to male land owners—gathered to hear proclamations, witness trials, hear philosophical lectures, and debate and vote on political and civic issues. Over time, as the concept of citizen has expanded, so too has the breadth of spaces dedicated to critical civic and political discourse.
Political theory has recently taken what Dryzek (2000) refers to as a deliberative turn, which refers to an emphasis on communication about political and civic matters, hence placing politics and engagement into a sphere of social activities. Effective political and civic deliberation is contingent upon the ability of the discourse to prompt reflection and ultimately result in a collective outcome. In fact, Dryzek felt even at the end of the millennium that the state of affairs was better described in terms of what he called discursive democracy (Dryzek, 1990), where discussion of many types—including not only rational and/or persuasive argument, but also sarcasm, humor, gossip, storytelling, appeal to emotion, and more—leads to reflection and in which individual states have less and less control over a discourse that is increasingly international. Introduce social media, a sociotechnical grab bag of every sort of rhetorical and discursive communication available, into this frame at the beginning of the new millenium, and social media’s central role in reshaping civic and political life becomes obvious.
Jürgen Habermas (1989) famously traced the evolution of what he called the “public sphere” (discussed at length in Chapter 3) through 19th- and early 20th-century Europe as it expanded into a more bourgeois society of merchants and other middle-class citizens. He proposed that these citizens increasingly engaged in “rational-critical debate” in the cafes and salons that emerged, at least in part, for this purpose. In the age of the internet, many sociotechnical and political theorists have moved quickly to discuss the implications of a digitally mediated public sphere (Benkler, 2006; Boeder, 2005; Castells, 2009; Dahlberg, 2001; Dahlgren, 2005, 2009, 2016; Papacharissi, 2002, 2009, 2010; Poor, 2005), and this discussion evolves with the speed of digital innovation and contemporary cultural liquidity.
Today, although shaky at times, most democratic polities embrace at least the concept of participation of all classes. The advent of mass media in the 20th century has allowed for information to flow easily to such a wide swath of the public who might not otherwise find themselves in common spaces in which to engage in discourse. Many public and civic spaces in the current period, then, have become “de-physicalized.” One of the many virtual spaces we inhabit includes space for public discourse, and the nature and use of such space is an ongoing topic of interest to scholars in communication, information science, political science, and other fields.
The appearance of social media and widespread social-media enhancements to a plethora of internet environments at the start of the 21st century has added a new twist to the contemporary understanding of civic participation. The advent of these tools, which are radically non-authoritarian when compared, for example, to television, have raised the question of whether a new era of civic engagement is underway. Papacharissi (2010) suggests that citizens today encounter civic society as a hybrid environment of overlapping private and public spheres and that citizenship itself is experienced in a highly fluid manner.
Technology utopians view the appearance of networked information sharing environments as an unrivaled democratizing force (Benkler, 2006; Nisbet, Stoycheff and Pearce, 2012; Rheingold, 2000; Stoycheff and Nisbet, 2014; Valenzuela, Park, and Key, 2009), which can both enhance the effectiveness of already engaged citizens (Bimber, 1999; DiMaggio et al, 2004; Krueger, 2002; Norris, 2000, 2001; Polat, 2005; Weber, Loumakis, and Bergman, 2003) and bring new citizens into the fold (Delli Carpini, 2000; Krueger, 2002; Ward, Gibson, and Lusoli, 2003; Weber, Loumakis, and Bergman, 2003). On the other hand, technology pessimists find that issues like inequitable access, surveillance, the viral spread of rumors and fake news, and the echo chamber of selected friends and hyper-targeted media preempt the usefulness of digital networks for democratic discourse (Gerhards and Schäfer, 2010; Kaufhold, Valenzuela and De Zúñiga, 2010; Putnam, 1995, 2000; Stroud, 2008; Sunstein, 2007). Of course, the truth is much more nuanced and complicated, requiring consideration of what kinds of people are using which platforms in which contexts for what purposes (Boullianne, 2009). In this book, we will examine the use of recently emerging social information and computing technologies as they have been appropriated for use in civic, political, and other contexts of public participation.
Voida et al. (2014) find that literature on e-government systems tends to be grouped into three values themes. First is the value of access, or the ability of citizens to acquire information and have influence on their governments. The second is efficiency, a value that stresses cost-cutting and tame-saving features of digital services. Finally, the value of education stresses how e-government systems can increase awareness and understanding of civic and governmental processes, hence making citizens more informed, reflective, and empowering them to be more active in their civic contexts.
1.2 CIVIC ENGAGEMENT
It makes sense to begin by asking what we mean by the term civic engagement. There have been many takes on defining what civic engagement means, but an overview of several reveals that there are commonalities.
The Center for Information on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), which studies youth engagement, divides civic engagement into three categories (Keeter et al., 2002):
• Civic activities
• Electoral activities
• Political voice
Civic activities include volunteering for non-electoral organizations, membership in groups or associations, participation in fundraising for causes, and community problem solving. Electoral activities include voting on a regular basis; persuading others; displaying buttons, signs, or stickers; making campaign contributions; and volunteering in political campaigns or for political organizations. Political voice involves contacting officials or media, protesting, petitioning, canvassing, and engaging in political actions such as boycotts.
Korn and Voida (2015) distinguish between two major forms of civic engagement as viewed through the lens of human-computer interaction. In the first, designers and researchers work within mainstream political contexts, for example to create e-government services, to make voting more straightforward and accessible, to seek input from citizens on government actions, and to enable and foster debate and deliberation. In the second, designers and researchers work outside of mainstream political channels, for example to support the work of activists, non-governmental organizations, protesters, and others in non-official capacities.
Another approach to understanding civic engagement is to focus on processes involved in various stages of action and on the contexts that enable and influence the effectiveness of these processes. For example, Gordon, Baldwin-Philippi, and Balestra (2013) delineate three major activities that constitute most forms of civic engagement:
• Acquiring and processing
