For us, the phrase “by any media necessary” captures five important aspects of contemporary civic culture, developed over the next five sections of this chapter. First, we look at how new hybrid systems of media-content circulation can bring unprecedented power to the voices of individuals and groups without access to mainstream forms of distribution. Second, we push back against recent accounts that have focused primarily on the political effects of singular platforms—Twitter or Facebook—in favor of a model that sees young activists as deploying any and all available media channels to share their messages (transmedia mobilization). Third, we make an argument for the importance of the civic imagination as a set of practices designed to inspire participants to change the world. Fourth, we trace the ways that the public’s expanded communication capacities are enabling a transfer of skills and practices from participatory culture toward participatory politics. And finally, we consider the ways that participating in these networks provides opportunities for informal, peer-to-peer civic education, a process that we link to larger considerations of connected learning.
Beyond Culture Jamming: The Politics of Circulation
Confronting a world dominated by broadcast media, owned by corporate monopolies and largely closed to grassroots messaging, Mark Dery (1993) urged activists to disrupt the flow, block the signal, and hijack the signs coming from Hollywood and Madison Avenue—an approach known as culture jamming. Dery projected that an alternative form of politics might emerge as networked communications became more widely accessible, one he hoped would be “interactive rather than passive, nomadic and atomized rather than resident and centralized, egalitarian rather than elitist.” As Jenkins, Ford, and Green (2013) note in Spreadable Media, the past few decades have seen dramatic increases in grassroots access to resources for cultural production and circulation and improvements to the infrastructure required for collective action. Spreadable Media draws a distinction between distribution (corporately controlled flows of media) and circulation (a hybrid system where content flows at least partially on the basis of decisions by individuals and groups, even as it is still responding to a context created through the agenda setting and content production of media industries). Today, rather than jam the signal, activist groups surf media flows. Rather than seeing themselves as saboteurs who seek to destroy the power of popular culture, they regard popular narratives as shared resources that facilitate their conversations (Jenkins forthcoming).
Let’s consider a powerful example of how the circulation of media content through social media can significantly amplify the voices of politically active youth. University of Oregon undergraduate Samantha Stendal was outraged by the media coverage around the 2013 Steubenville rape trial, which involved two Ohio high school football stars who were arrested, tried, and convicted of raping a 16-year-old girl after she got drunk at a party. The mainstream media, Stendal felt, paid more attention to how these accusations would adversely affect the high school athletes than to how the rape would impact the life of the young woman. She and some classmates produced a short (25-second) video entitled “A Needed Response,” which modeled how “real men” might react in a similar situation—showing care for a drunken female coed, rather than violating her. Stendal posted the video on YouTube as a contribution to the larger conversation: “The message I hope that people can get from this video is that we need to treat one another with respect. No matter what gender, we should be listening to each other and making sure there is consent” (“‘A Needed Response’” 2013). The video spread fast, reaching more than a million views within a few months and provoking editorial responses from mainstream news outlets. Ultimately, the purple-haired filmmaker and her collaborators received a Peabody Award, the first ever given for a YouTube video. The publicity around the Peabody Award, presented in May 2014, pushed its viewership even higher; as of April 2015, it had surpassed 10 million views. This is a spectacular success by any account, but success does not necessarily require such massive viewership or such national impact. By lowering transaction costs, digital processes of circulation make it possible for communication to occur at various levels; consider how many student-produced videos might reach 1,000 or 10,000 viewers, and compare that to the communication environment of a few decades ago. We might understand this award-winning video as simply one text—one communication act among many—that has led to a greater public focus on “rape culture” and the failure of administrative responses to rape on American college campuses in recent years.
Networked Practices
In many cases, media tactics move fluidly between online and offline spaces, and messages circulate in both tangible and virtual forms. “Yarn bombing” represents an emerging tactic for feminist interventions in public spaces, with knitters (most often women) taking over the streets through the spontaneous and unauthorized creation of yarn installations that might wrap around or cover over a public eyesore or otherwise seek to convert the ways we engage with our everyday surroundings (Close forthcoming). Yarn bombing is a material practice; while the specifics are new, it resembles graffiti, street theater, and a range of other ways that protest groups have occupied the streets. Yet yarn bombing is also a networked practice. Participants find each other online; they use social media to facilitate their planning or to share techniques with other collectives; and they capture and transmit photographs of their work.
And in many cases, social movement participants are also using networked communication practices to respond to content produced and distributed through broadcast media, again altering processes of circulation. In 2010, TLC (formerly The Learning Channel) launched a reality television series, All-American Muslim, which followed the daily lives of Muslim families in Dearborn, Michigan. In early December 2011, the Florida Family Association (FFA), a conservative group dedicated to defending “traditional American Biblical values,” argued that All-American Muslim dangerously “misrepresented” American Muslims by focusing on everyday suburban families. According to the FFA, this focus on the ordinariness of American Muslim lives would “lull” Americans into thinking that Islam posed no threat to the American “way of life.” The group was able to pressure Lowe’s (the home improvement store chain) and other sponsors to withdraw their advertisements. But then American Muslims engaged on social networking sites, using the hashtag #LOWEsboycott to fight back.
Kadir, an American Muslim digital media consultant, recalled how he helped organize the Lowe’s boycott on Facebook. His and others’ initial Facebook posts led to a series of conference calls to discuss next steps. More than 40 activists participated in one of those calls. They started a Google group for the “steering committee.” They put up a website. They created a petition on signon.org. Then they volunteered to organize protests in Virginia, New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and California. Their activities ranged from online petitions and circulated videos to a Hijabi Flashmob staged in a Lowe’s store in the Bay Area. Soon, prominent and established American Muslim advocacy organizations like the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) gave their support, and news outlets like CNN, the New York Times, and the Huffington Post reported the Lowe’s boycott story.
By December 14, the controversy reached The Daily Show, where host Jon Stewart voiced his dismay “that some group in Florida complain[ed] that the Muslims on All-American Muslim [were] too normal.” Speaking from a Lowe’s parking lot during that same comedy segment, “Senior Muslim Correspondent” Aasif Mandvi reported that he was “disappointed” because Lowe’s should be shut down completely: “If we are serious about fighting terror, we have to shut down their supply chain, i.e. Lowe’s, aka the one stop jihadi-superstore.” The company did not ultimately reverse its decision; All-American Muslim was canceled after one season due to low ratings. But the networked activists were able to galvanize popular awareness, as other Muslim and non-Muslim institutions, celebrities, and public figures voiced their support.
Stories That Matter
In Why Voice Matters, Nick Couldry (2010) defines voice as the capacity of people to “give an account of themselves and of their place in the world” in terms that are not only personally meaningful but can also be heard and acted on by others. Couldry makes clear that serious work on the politics of “voice” requires us to go beyond “a celebration of people speaking or telling