Participatory Politics: Next-Generation Tactics to Remake Public Spheres

Mind the Risks

Now I will address a series of concerns that merit serious attention as we work to encourage the strengths and minimize the risks of next-generation civic engagement. Digital tools remove some of the barriers to civic participation, but they also eliminate some of the safeguards that have traditionally been in place to mitigate harm, and they can invite their own problems as well.

Simplification

Digital media conventions for production and circulation can compel citizens to sacrifice important nuance in the messages that drive movements. Brevity, such as the 140-character limit of Twitter or the assumption that videos won’t “go viral” if they’re more than a couple of minutes long, is often blamed for the dumbing down of civic discourse. Yet time and again we see politically trenchant Twitter feeds that manage to spark profound debate through short bursts of expression. In contrast, hour-long videos can be dismayingly and dangerously simplistic.

The underlying problem is not the inherent limits of any given format or genre. It’s the belief that for a message to spread, it has to lack complexity or internal contradiction. It’s true that any media product in isolation will never capture all there is to say, acknowledge every caveat, or consider every possible point of view. That’s why we’re calling for studies of participatory politics that account for bodies of work over time, for media that are both spreadable and drillable (Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013) and for actions that don’t reduce enduring conflicts with deep roots and far-flung implications to battles between good guys and bad guys.

The tools and tactics of participatory politics are, in fact, uniquely set up to reveal the hidden harm of what looks virtuous and the logic that can hide underneath something too easily dismissed as all wrong. That said, with more and more movements targeting change at the level of discourse, we run the risk of pursuing simple attention as the ultimate political currency, sometimes forgoing or at least postponing efforts to change something more concrete, like a law or a policy (Zuckerman 2012a).

Sensationalization

The pressure to simplify often triggers an urge to sensationalize: Let’s find the most extreme, grotesque, and riveting manifestation of whatever civic issue is motivating our politics and heighten that story through digital media production and dissemination. This phenomenon is as old as every form of media itself. What’s new is that young people are increasingly the ones creating the news, so they need to be aware of the ways in which their own productions can reify these familiar patterns.

Sensational stories can make for great media, but they distort the truth. In creating compelling content worlds, we can’t lose sight of scale. How representative is this story? Who benefits from this telling? What will it mean for those profiled in any given account to be presented in this light? Just because young people are among those who have suffered the most from media sensationalization doesn’t mean they’re immune to the instinct to tell the most attention-grabbing story. What can get lost are the efforts to dislodge more mundane realities that reinforce the status quo, as well as the less glamorous grind of pursuing legislative and policy change.

Slippage

For civically engaged youth who follow a range of political-thought leaders and movements, any given day’s social media feed can play like a surreal simulcasting of disparate struggles—local, national, and global. The challenge that comes with this weird juxtaposition of dispatches is that it becomes easy to assume that the dynamics governing the causes you actually know a lot about are universally relevant. Conditions that differentiate struggles and call for specific forms of organizing can slip out of focus.

With many of the most politically charged issues in recent memory, there has been a curious pattern of community members claiming a kind of one-click solidarity that moves beyond the message “I get you” or “I’m with you” all the way to “I am you” or even “We are all you.” This sentiment has echoed through the “We are the 99 percent” discourse of the Occupy movement; photos of white people in hoodies to signal their support for Trayvon Martin, the black teen who was killed by a neighborhood watchman in Florida; “We are all Khaled Said” status updates on the case of a young Egyptian man beaten to death by policemen during the Arab Spring; and even the controversy around a blog post asserting “I am Adam Lanza’s mother” in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, written by a woman who believed her own mentally ill son to be capable of chilling violence.

It can be advantageous and enriching to focus on commonalities that unite our struggles and to insist on the possibility of empathy across disparate identities and experiences. But there is also the risk here that conventions in digital shorthand gloss over such inequalities as class, race, geography, and disability, which must be seen for what they are if participatory politics are to advance freedom and justice in public spheres.

Unsustainability

In participatory politics, as in many other things in life, getting started is often a lot easier than keeping something going. In the wake of a specific crisis, like Hurricane Sandy in New York and New Jersey, we can see an intense and hopeful flurry of public response that dwindles quickly as people return to their daily lives. Even with persistent community problems—like the inaccessibility of high-quality, affordable, fresh food in low-income communities—sometimes developers or funders will become energized to create prototypes for solutions but fall short of resources, both human and monetary, to build the level of enduring engagement necessary to make those interventions take root and grow.

The challenge is to manage expectations from the outset of an undertaking and to set a realistic scope and plan for any given effort’s “end-of-life decisions” (as my Youth Radio colleague dramatically calls the need for a clear handoff and postlaunch strategy for every app created in our lab). Otherwise, underresourced communities already subjected to inadequate and inconsistent public support find themselves dealing with the aftermath of empty platforms, glitchy sites, stalled efforts, and broken commitments.

Saviorism

When distance shrinks and young people are exposed to faraway struggles without sufficient context, saviorism can set in. Through well-meaning civic engagements, those who are already relatively empowered to “do good” and “make a difference” can lead with their own needs, reproducing privilege and worse.

That much has been established, I hope, throughout this report, so I won’t repeat the points here. But I would just add that this dynamic isn’t an issue only in cases of global activism like the events surrounding Kony 2012. Consider another 2012 video sensation, Caine’s Arcade. This tells the story of a nine-year-old boy who cobbled together a magnificent arcade out of cardboard, stuffed animals, and plastic toys, all of it held together with a dazzling hodgepodge of pipe cleaners, pushpins, colored yarn, and see-through duct tape.

Caine operated the arcade out of his dad’s East Los Angeles auto-body shop. A local filmmaker happened to come into the shop, saw Caine’s installation, and was totally inspired. (You’d pretty much need to have a heart of stone not to be.) So he decided to make a film about it. The filmmaker got the idea to surprise Caine with a huge crowd of visitors, so in cahoots with Caine’s dad, he arranged for a humongous crowd of Angelenos to descend on the auto-body shop while Caine was out for lunch.

In the video, you watch the boy arrive on the scene strapped into the seat of a car, giggling and beaming when he sees the cheering crowd. The filmmaker greets Caine with a microphone and says to the throng, “Welcome to Caine’s arcade, man.” It’s a genius, chills-inducing cinematic moment and might very well be a main reason the video became such a sensation, launching a scholarship campaign that is likely to make a real difference in Caine’s life.

In addition to the achievement itself and the filmmaker’s commitment and brilliance, the event is also a moment when Caine’s position shifts from host to interviewee, from a maker who masterminded an elaborate invention to a kid arriving at his own surprise party. (Actually, another way to look at it is that Caine got to be all four of these things at once.) The larger point is that in our efforts to join forces with young people at their most creative and powerful, it’s probably worthwhile to watch for moments like these so that we’re aware of the new dynamics that media attention and adult involvement can set in motion when young people’s voices are heard in public spheres in a big way.