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 to be achieved, there need to be “minimal shared commitments to the vision and procedures of democracy, which in turn entails a capacity to see beyond the immediate interests of one’s own group” (156). The organizations and networks we discuss—to varying degrees—provide the preconditions for this kind of civic culture. These groups achieve this kind of political potential by fostering a shared set of values regarding what an ideal society might look like, encouraging a sense of affinity among members, enabling access to greater knowledge about the world and the issues they confront, modeling a set of democratic and participatory practices, helping youth to develop their identities as civic agents, and providing a context for meaningful political discussions. Dahlgren models these traits as a circuit; each builds upon the other, reinforcing the group’s progress toward supporting democratic participation. Even where all of these conditions are met, there still often needs to be some kind of catalyst that inspires this civic culture to take action around a particular concern. What we are calling participatory politics involves activities that foster one or another attribute of Dahlgren’s civic culture but also efforts to inspire and organize civic action. We will revisit these criteria in Chapter 3 as we discuss how fan organizations like the Harry Potter Alliance and Nerdfighters provide the preconditions for civic and political participation.
Across this opening chapter, we have introduced five foundational concepts (as well as a range of related vocabulary) that will inform the chapters that follow. First, we described how individuals and groups outside the dominant political structures are making use of emergent systems of narrative circulation to give their voices a strength and scope often unavailable to earlier generations. Second, we described the concept of transmedia mobilization/activism to stress ways young people are seeking to shape public opinion across a broad range of different platforms. Third, we discussed the civic imagination as opening up possibilities to envision alternatives and through them, to think about what kinds of change might be possible. Fourth, we talked about participatory politics as a set of practices that allow young people to deploy the skills they acquired through their everyday engagements with social media and participatory culture to change the world. And finally, we discussed connected learning in terms of the ways these organizations enhance their participants’ civic education, often by connecting the political realm to other activities they care about. We see close relationships between these core concepts, which suggest something about the media strategies, creative vision, organizational activities, and informal learning practices through which American youth are conducting politics in the early 21st century.
What Comes Next?
In the next five chapters, we examine each of our case study organizations. As we do so, we will expand the analytic vocabulary we use to discuss participatory politics. Chapter 2 considers Invisible Children as a group that struggles to reconcile its attempts to control the framing of its message and its dispersed network of young participants who help spread that message. Here we identify paradoxes that shape this and many other organizations that are trying to embrace participatory politics. Among the tensions we consider are those between goals and process, comprehensible and complex stories, activism and entertainment, consensus and contention, spreadable and drillable messages, and top-down and bottom-up approaches. We explore the ways that Invisible Children, in ramping up to Kony 2012, placed more emphasis on empowering youth to tell their own stories, yet following the backlash against the video, became progressively more centralized—ultimately disbanding its participatory activities, and finally announcing plans to shut down. At the same time, we rebut some of the criticisms directed against IC, showing how it was not exclusively reliant on a politics based on digital circulation but rather sought to prepare participants for more in-depth engagement with its mission through on-the-ground, face-to-face activities as well as the use of social media.
Chapter 3 considers the Harry Potter Alliance, Imagine Better, and the Nerdfighters as examples of fan activism. Over the years, these groups have addressed a range of different causes, rather than define themselves around a single mission, and they have relied on the larger infrastructures that have grown up around fan communities. Here we deepen our concept of the civic imagination, exploring how these groups harness the power of popular culture as an alternative, shared language through which to talk about politics. References to shared content worlds carry affective attachments for their members, offering more empowering fantasies about what it might mean to fight for social justice. We consider two different models—fannish civics and cultural acupuncture—that these groups deploy to mobilize public support. The difference between the two has to do with the depth of knowledge of the original content world each assumes. Fannish civics inspires fans as fans through their shared mastery of shared texts, whereas cultural acupuncture seeks to gain greater circulation by attaching a group’s messages to larger public conversations, often inspired by the release of a new entertainment product. This chapter also considers how shared tastes may provide the basis for the creation of “public spheres of the imagination,”