I have chosen to examine studies of engagement in two major categories: political engagement in democratic situations and political engagement in confrontational situations. Both are about changing the way things are, which is why we engage in political discourse in the first place. Social media has been up to the task of assisting with change in both cases, but in very different ways.
The book ends with challenges, which seem at times to overwhelm the opportunities. I began my research in this area a little over ten years ago, which just about tracks the lifespan of social media. Like many (not all), I started out as an optimist about the promise of social media for broadening participation and enhancing civic engagement. At this moment in time, however, it can seem more like a nightmare, as bad actors discover the possibilities of social platforms and related technologies. In fact, I think we are at a sobering inflection point, probably the same one that is encountered by all technology optimists as their favorite tools enter the larger sphere of public use. For better or worse, social media for civic engagement has “come of age.”
This book will hopefully serve as a guidepost for going forward by showing where we have been, describing how we got here, and highlighting what is important in this vital area of research and practice.
Acknowledgments
This project could not have been completed without the endless patience, support, and inspiration provided by my wife, Mara Miller. She endured and successfully countered more bouts of “I can’t do this” than should be expected of anyone. I am also eternally grateful to Jack Carroll, who has been my mentor and champion throughout my career.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
1.1 TECHNOLOGY AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE
Historically, towns, villages, and cities had an area in which people gathered for common purpose—for example, to obtain food in the marketplace or gather water at the well. When people get together they like to talk politics, broadly defined, and in such public spaces, the state of political affairs and the foibles of the state’s rulers have certainly always been discussed along with other shared concerns such as the weather and the latest gossip. Since the advent of democratic government, and especially as its inclusiveness has broadened, citizens have used public spaces to deliberate and make decisions about how their government, both local and national, works.
Most modern urban environments no longer have a central well or its physical equivalent. Many previously public activities have moved into the private domain. Supermarkets are not marketplaces, but rather commercial ventures designed to encourage shopping and discourage interaction. In many places, especially in the age of perceived global terrorism, modern public spaces such as transportation hubs and parks have restrictions on congregation and discourse among strangers. But in contemporary society a new kind of public space has emerged. Networked computing environments, ubiquitous mobile platforms, convergent media, and social software have combined to enable digital civic engagement and perhaps create new forms of civic participation.
While a small group may come to consensus through discussion amongst themselves, a larger group, and most certainly groups at the size of towns and nations, must develop organizational structures through which the expressions of individuals may flow to decision makers who are, in turn, empowered to make decisions, take actions, and enforce policies and practices. Thus, representative government and deliberative politics depend on the ability of individuals to express themselves using both information transfer and communication techniques that span distances and also more intimate spaces of some kind or another to allow for immediate deliberation and discourse.
Systems of messengers such as the ancient Greeks and the League of the Iroquois, and later the postal system riders of colonial America, allowed for the practice of collective decision making and governance 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