From Voice to Influence: Understanding Citizenship in a Digital Age

By Danielle Allen and Jennifer S. Light

How have online protests—like the recent outrage over the Komen Foundation’s decision to defund Planned Parenthood—changed the nature of political action? How do Facebook and other popular social media platforms shape the conversation around current political issues? The ways in which we gather information about current events and communicate it with others have been transformed by the rapid rise of digital media. The political is no longer confined to the institutional and electoral arenas, and that has profound implications for how we understand citizenship and political participation.

With From Voice to Influence, Danielle Allen and Jennifer S. Light have brought together a stellar group of political and social theorists, social scientists, and media analysts to explore this transformation. Threading through the contributions is the notion of egalitarian participatory democracy, and among the topics discussed are immigration rights activism, the participatory potential of hip hop culture, and the porous boundary between public and private space on social media. The opportunities presented for political efficacy through digital media to people who otherwise might not be easily heard also raise a host of questions about how to define “good participation:” Does the ease with which one can now participate in online petitions or conversations about current events seduce some away from serious civic activities into “slacktivism?”

 Drawing on a diverse body of theory, from Hannah Arendt to Anthony Appiah, From Voice to Influence offers a range of distinctive visions for a political ethics to guide citizens in a digitally connected world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Jun 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9780226262437

Book preview

From Voice to Influence

From Voice to Influence

Understanding Citizenship in a Digital Age

Edited by

Danielle Allen and Jennifer S. Light

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

Danielle Allen is professor of government and director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. She is the author or editor of several books, including, most recently, Our Declaration. Jennifer S. Light is professor of science, technology, and society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of From Warfare to Welfare and The Nature of Cities.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2015 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2015.

Printed in the United States of America

24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15   1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-26212-3 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-26226-0 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-26243-7 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226262437.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

From voice to influence : understanding citizenship in a digital age / edited by Danielle Allen and Jennifer S. Light.

pages ; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-26212-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-26226-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-26243-7 (ebook) 1. Digital media—Political aspects—United States. 2. Political participation—United States. 3. Social media—United States. 4. Youth—Political activity—United States. I. Allen, Danielle S., 1971– editor. II. Light, Jennifer S., 1971– editor.

P95.82.U6F76 2015

302.230973—dc23

2014048483

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Danielle Allen and Jennifer S. Light

Part I. Toward Participatory Politics

1 Putting Our Conversation in Context: Youth, Old Media, and Political Participation, 1800–1971

Jennifer S. Light

2 Youth, New Media, and the Rise of Participatory Politics

Joseph Kahne, Ellen Middaugh, and Danielle Allen

Part II. Participation Up Close: Case Studies

3 Impure Dissent: Hip Hop and the Political Ethics of Marginalized Black Urban Youth

Tommie Shelby

4 Undocumented, Unafraid, and Unapologetic: DREAM Activists, Immigrant Politics, and the Queering of Democracy

Cristina Beltrán

5 The Dangers of Transparent Friends: Crossing the Public and Intimate Spheres

Wendy Chun

Part III. Participation Out Far: Concepts and Mechanisms

6 Cute Cats to the Rescue? Participatory Media and Political Expression

Ethan Zuckerman

7 Viral Engagement: Fast, Cheap, and Broad, but Good for Democracy?

Archon Fung and Jennifer Shkabatur

8 Reconceiving Public Spheres: The Flow Dynamics Model

Danielle Allen

Part IV. Participatory Vistas

9 Pursuing Cognitive Democracy

Henry Farrell and Cosma Rohilla Shalizi

10 Reclaiming Disinterestedness for the Digital Era

Howard Gardner

11 Achieving Rooted Cosmopolitanism in a Digital Age

Angel Parham and Danielle Allen

12 Acting Politically in a Digital Age

Noëlle McAfee

Conclusion

Danielle Allen and Jennifer S. Light

Notes

References

Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

This book has been a journey. At its origin lie the efforts of one of us to think about citizenship in contemporary circumstances. A decade ago, when Danielle Allen gave lectures pertaining to Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education, she repeatedly received two questions: (1) How did her argument about political friendship and talking to strangers pertain to immigration? (2) How did the argument pertain to discourse in the digital sphere? Recognizing that these questions were too big for her to handle on her own, Danielle sought help.

Enter a stunning group of contributors, one of whom was also prepared to step into the demanding and urgently necessary role of coeditor. None of the thinking in this book could have been done by one person alone. The first note of thanks must therefore be given to all those who participated in conversations that took place over a period of two years to produce this volume: all the contributors, as well as Cathy Cohen, Deven Desai, Jeni Forestal, and Henry Jenkins.

A bigger conversation surrounds the one captured in this volume: the conversation among members of the MacArthur Research Network on youth and participatory politics. We thank all of them and the MacArthur Foundation for having provided the reason for this book to come into being. Although youth are not in the title of our volume, the experience of youth with digital media has been indispensable to our ability to come to understand civic agency in contemporary circumstances. Several chapters in this volume are particularly marked by that analytic trajectory.

To our own surprise, this book answers both of the questions that lie at its origins: the one about democracy and immigration; the other about democracy and digital life. It was our intention to answer the second question, about the digital sphere. As it turns out, by virtue of having included Cristina Beltrán and her work on immigrant activism in the conversation, we were also forced to answer the first question. To deal effectively with questions of immigration when working in the space of democratic theory, one needs to modulate the conversation from a concern for citizenship to a concern for civic agency, as we have done over the course of the volume.¹

With regard to the question of how to understand civic agency in the digital sphere, the challenge in getting to an answer by drawing on a group brain, a collective writing process, was the following: No author who was invited to participate had already signed on to Danielle’s normative view as articulated in Talking to Strangers. Nor was there an assumption that participants should come to any shared normative view, let alone that one in particular. In fact, the entire purpose of this project was to achieve a democratic answer to the theoretical question about civic agency in the digital age, to deploy for the purposes of intellectual work the methods advocated in Talking to Strangers—that is, the practice of talking to strangers in conditions developed to call forth trustworthiness and thereby generate trust. In order, then, to explain this volume’s theory of democracy, one actually has to identify the theory of democracy that exists as an emergent property of the agreements and disagreements that develop over the course of the book.

As we have finalized this volume, we have made that identification and have named what we found: egalitarian participatory democracy. The purpose of this term is to set our arguments in contrast to liberal, communitarian, neorepublican, agonistic, and deliberative theories of democracy. Thus, in the introduction, we write:

The theoretical center of gravity in this volume might instead be said to lie in very recent work that develops an ideal of egalitarian participatory democracy, which is oriented toward how people who live together—whether locally or globally—shape their worlds together, especially in conditions of diversity, working both through and outside of political institutions. Our key concepts—voice, public spheres, and civic agency—are critical for understanding the potential for egalitarian participatory democracy in contemporary circumstances.

The forms of civic agency that characterize an ideal of egalitarian participatory democracy are specified in the ideals articulated by each contributor to this book. Most important, with this very capacious account of the content of an ideal of egalitarian participatory democracy, and of the political ethics that characterizes that ideal, we believe we have built a framework that can move the scholarly and public conversation beyond the routine use of a deliberative democracy framework to judge sociopolitical relations in the networked digital age.

We never would have brought our thinking to this level of clarity and definition without the prodding, challenging comments of five anonymous reviewers of the manuscript. To them we are indebted beyond our capacity to provide recompense. Best then, to say, simply, thank you. If we have achieved something meaningful here beyond the parameters of each particular discipline represented in the volume, we owe it to them.

Similarly, we are deeply indebted to John Tryneski, our superb editor at the University of Chicago Press, who believed in this project and steered it to the finish line, ably assisted by Rodney Powell.

Laura McCune, at the Institute for Advanced Study, has kept this project moving forward at every stage of its development: from the initial invitations to contributors, to the actual face-to-face workshops in Princeton, the production of collated draft manuscripts, and finally the finished version. Her labors have been herculean.

Finally, each of us wishes to thank her family: Jen thanks Jon, Anja, and Felix. Danielle thanks Jimmy, Nora, and William.

Introduction

Danielle Allen and Jennifer S. Light

The Grand Challenge

The radical transformation of information and communications technologies over the last two decades has been the backdrop to changes in political participation and experiences of civic agency that can feel equally disruptive. The rise (and fall) of cable; the commercialization of the Internet; the invention of interactive, social media that turn media consumers into producers and users simultaneously, or produsers, of digital content; the historically unparalleled rapid penetration of mobile devices; the conversion to digital image making and crowdsourced knowledge production: these are among the features that have transformed communicative landscapes around the world over the last thirty years. Their emergence has coincided with a geopolitical period that has seen a rise in the rate of civil war and also, more recently, in social protest events.¹ This has led many commentators to ask how new media² are collectively reshaping political life.

Some scholars and journalists have asked, for instance, about how new technologies may have altered the nature of political revolution. Looking at examples from the color revolutions in states that were formerly part of the Soviet Union (in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan between 2003 and 2005) to the green revolution in Iran (2009–10) and the Arab Spring of 2011 that toppled the governments or leaders of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and Yemen, they wonder how social media influenced the unfolding course of events.³

Others have inquired about technologies’ impacts on stable political systems and asked whether networked digital media have changed the relationships and balance of power between political institutions and civil society. Do technological developments explain, as some have argued, the fact that in 1999—for the first time since its founding in 1971—the Libertarian Party began to make a real mark on US politics with new media-fueled campaigns that succeeded at derailing new banking regulations?⁴

Still others have charged that the ease with which one can now participate in online petitions or viral conversations about current events is seducing young people away from serious civic activities and into slacktivism.⁵

As journalists and scholars across the disciplinary landscape have tried to make sense of the relationship between changes in the media landscape and in public life, their work has often emphasized technology as the subject of analysis—for example, who controls media infrastructure and content, and on what policy terms; the differences for participant experience on specific platforms, for example, those that require or prohibit pseudonyms; and the consequences of the online competition between political activity and entertainment. Important political questions flow from these accounts, with particularly valuable work having been done by now on subjects including corporate control of associational life, surveillance, and the empowerment of dark speech (e.g., gossip, rumor, misinformation, and abusive anonymity).⁶

Conversations have progressed sufficiently far that it is now possible to draw some preliminary conclusions about the political implications of the new technologies. The early phase of the argument established two camps: the technological boosters who trumpeted the arrival of a new era of democracy thanks to the emergence of new technologies,⁷ and the detractors who saw technology making a difference at the margins but leaving untouched the basic infrastructure of states and political institutions through which power is deployed and resources allocated.⁸ Lately, a middle way has emerged. A group of scholars has come to consensus that new technologies make a difference at the margins for polities with established public spheres defined by freedom of the press and a tradition of a healthy civil society, while making considerably more difference for polities where public spheres have been weak and subject to the censorship and disruption of authoritarian regimes.⁹ This seems right.

Yet even as these conversations have matured, they have left important questions unasked—questions that begin not from technology but from civic relationships. Here and there we catch a glimpse of those questions. At the 2012 Futures of Entertainment conference at MIT, a panel entitled, From Participatory Culture to Political Participation gathered together four young leaders of digital associations or new media efforts: Lauren Bird, the creative media coordinator of the Harry Potter Alliance; Dorian Electra, a performing artist best known for YouTube videos such as I Love Friedrich Hayek; and Aman Ali and Bassam Tariq, co-creators of the group 30 Mosques in 30 Days. The panelists were engaged, respectively, in support of marriage equality, the dissemination of Hayekian economic ideas, and efforts to claim space in the public sphere for American Muslims. When asked whether they thought of themselves as political, however, all said no. Why exactly? What does this response say about our collective intuitions about the meaning of the political? When these young leaders eschewed that category, what were they revealing about how they understand civic relationships? More generally, how are civic relationships evolving within the context of a shifting media landscape?

In this volume we are motivated by an interest in subjects ranging from sociopolitical identity formation to the types and degrees of voice and agency available to those who wish to participate in political contexts, all considered against the backdrop of a rapidly transforming media landscape. What are the mechanisms by which influence develops out of voice? And if new technologies may be put to both positive and negative uses, then how do we cultivate strong and healthy practices of fair and democratic citizenship? What political ethics should guide us through our digitally mediated encounters with our co-residents, each of us in our own specific polities, and on the globe generally, so that our actions—communications and choices—support flourishing cultures of democratic egalitarianism and just democratic institutions?

By making technology the backdrop rather than the subject of analysis, this book seeks to expand and refine conversations about new media and politics ongoing in several fields. We are motivated by a different set of research questions: first, about how participation and civic or political agency are changing and, second, about the content of admirable versions of citizenship in the digital age. Our hope is that political theorists and philosophers, political scientists, and media studies scholars will all find our concentrated attention on the nature and quality of civic relationships and participatory political practices to be of value. Our focus is the United States, but in our research questions and working methods we hope to supply a model that is also useful for scholars whose primary interest is political life in other settings. Most important, in this volume descriptive and normative work are inextricably partnered. Regardless of the specific scholarly discipline that brings a reader to our volume, we hope that each reader will undertake with us a somewhat unfamiliar voyage through territory shaped by that self-conscious merger of work that analyzes the civic life we currently experience and work that proposes how to define good participation in the digital age, thereby directing us toward a vision of what we can become.

Our Analytic Framework

Understanding citizenship in the digital age is one of the grand challenges of our day, one that requires bringing together into intellectual partnership a variety of forms of expertise. Our volume is the fruit of assembling a team from different domains capable collectively—and only collectively—of meeting this grand challenge. We gathered together scholars who specialize in the study of youth and technology, scholars who specialize in political participation, scholars who could re-theorize the public sphere, scholars who think historically and can help us master the concept of change, scholars who study the emergent properties of social interactions, and scholars who study ethics and social norms. In other words, we are a group of philosophers, political theorists, political scientists, sociologists, historians, psychologists, complexity theorists, and new media analysts. Ours was an effort not at interdisciplinarity, where individual scholars are expected to master multiple fields, but at disciplinary partnering. No contributor was expected to shed his or her own disciplinary paradigms, approaches, styles or, even practices of annotation. Each was expected instead to figure out how to make those tools maximally valuable for the collective work at hand, recognizing that each discipline could help solve a different part of the puzzle so that, together, we might begin to assemble a complete framework for thinking about citizenship in the digital age.

In the proliferation of scholarship on new media and politics, young people stand out. As is clear from the example of the 2012 Futures of Entertainment panel, youth experience calls into question traditional understandings of politics and citizenship.¹⁰ In addition to whether civic actors consider themselves political, there are other, basic questions. For example: What, more precisely, are the boundaries of the political? Do individuals who are excluded from voting (or who choose not to vote) participate in the public sphere? How do the boundaries of the political relate to the boundaries of the cultural? What’s more, youth are early adopters of novel technological tools. Although they are now on the political margins, they are tomorrow’s fully enfranchised citizens. Consequently, study of their experience offers insights into the future direction of political engagement in the wake of technological disruption. In 2008, 86 percent of eighteen to twenty-four-year-olds used a social networking site, compared to 50 percent of twenty-five- to thirty-year-olds and 22 percent of over-thirties. By 2012, 95 percent of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds were on such a site, but so were 86 percent of twenty-five- to thirty-year-olds and 61 percent of over-thirties. Similarly, in 2008, eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds were about twice as likely as twenty-five- to thirty-year-olds to belong to a political group on a social network site (15 percent to 8 percent) or to post political news to one (14 percent to 6 percent). Among the oldest age group, both activities were almost unheard of in 2008 (about 1 percent of the over thirties). By 2012 the gap had closed between the eighteen-to-twenty-four and twenty-five-to-thirty groups: the figures were 25 percent to 22 percent for belonging to a political group, and 31 percent to 29 percent in posting news. (Over-thirties made up some ground but still lagged behind in these acts at 9 percent and 13 percent, respectively, in 2012.)¹¹

As many others have, we too begin with youth.¹² Our decision to use youth as a point of departure for understanding citizenship in the digital age helped us to see those places where our existing conceptual tool kits had pieces missing: in the definitions of the political, civic, public spheres, and the like. We found that our conceptual problems had a great deal to do with how to think about the role of media and communication in politics, a subject studied in the political communication subfield of political science, in media and communication studies, and in social movement theory, but without having been well-integrated by the broader literature on political participation.¹³ We found ourselves directing significant group energy toward finding and developing conceptual tools to build a framework that would permit integrated study of the relationship between communicative contexts and politics.¹⁴

To achieve that integrated perspective, we broke our challenge into three research areas, pushing contributors to assimilate from one another the contributions of unfamiliar disciplines and a rich mix of collectively contributed data and case study material. Those areas were voice, public spheres, and civic agency. We chose civic agency instead of the term citizenship here, because it denotes not formal memberships but rather the activities through which people pursue political efficacy, regardless of their legal status. Indeed, over the course of our collective work, we came to understand citizenship as meaning, fundamentally, civic agency. Thus, we move beyond liberal, communitarian, and neo-republican frames for analyzing democracy by abandoning the lens of formal membership.¹⁵ The theoretical center of gravity in this volume might instead be said to lie in very recent work that develops an ideal of egalitarian participatory democracy, which is oriented toward how people who live together—whether locally or globally—shape their worlds together, especially in conditions of diversity, working both through and outside of political institutions.¹⁶ Our key concepts—voice, public spheres, and civic agency—are critical for understanding the potential for egalitarian participatory democracy in contemporary circumstances. The threads of these three themes are woven throughout the volume.

Voice

Recognizing the communicative possibilities now available through new media, contributors pursued accounts of voice—acts of self-expression—that adequately capture the meaning and significance of those avenues of expression to those who are otherwise without institutional means of expressive amplification—for instance, young people and marginalized populations. Our analyses here are not representative; we do not cover every possible demographic group. We sought out interesting cases that might generate analytical surprises and disrupt our conventional thinking about participation and political equality.

Public Spheres

Recognizing how much our generation’s technologies have shifted the media landscape generally, contributors sought to provide an explanatory framework for understanding sociopolitical efficacy in this brave new world. This theme forced us to think directly about exactly how voice can come to count as influence. We focus mainly on efficacy in the US context, but also sought to build frameworks for analyzing relationships between changes in the domestic public sphere of any particular country and the now much more easily accessible global public sphere.

Civic Agency

Recognizing the ways in which new media hold potential to strengthen and weaken democratic practice simultaneously, contributors sought visions of political agency—and modes of political ethics—that leverage the benefits of these technological tools to strengthen democratic practice. Our conversations, running over many months, led us to the view that understanding the best practices of egalitarian and participatory democracy requires us to return to the fundamental question of how we orient ourselves to our own interests: Are we and should we be self-interested, disinterested, or equitably interested? This concentrated set of ethical questions holds the key to invigorating forms of civic agency in contemporary circumstances, and several chapters open out into participatory vistas, to appropriate Walt Whitman’s title: essays that seek to breathe new breaths of life into our basic conceptions of democracy.¹⁷

Notably, this volume pairs descriptive and normative work, and in many pieces it even blends them. This is done in order to generate the intellectual resources out of which admirably just and legitimate forms of democratic citizenship can emerge in contemporary circumstances. We expect our work to stand in partnership with that of empirically-minded scholars who study the specific possibilities and perils of new technological affordances, and also with that of those who tackle the policy questions of infrastructure, legal arrangements, and security. Our distinctive contribution is to develop a sociologically rich understanding of how civic relationships are evolving; this sociologically rich account then serves as an anchor for normative contributions in political ethics. Such an anchor is necessary if those ethical visions are to gain traction in relation to the living questions that emerge from daily experience.

History and Theory

Part 1 of this volume, Toward Participatory Politics, provides historical and theoretical backdrop for thinking about civic agency and communications technology. It exemplifies the value of studying youth as a heuristic device to help rework taken-for-granted ideas about new media and politics, and about political participation and civic agency more generally. In chapter 1, Putting Our Conversation in Context: Youth, Old Media, and Political Participation, 1800–1971, Jennifer Light uses the history of youth political participation to call into question the implicit starting point of much contemporary discussion: that the recent impacts of new technology are distinct from what came before. Young people have long found ways to share political ideas among themselves and with adults, and new technologies have played a role in these activities for two centuries.

Light’s account details the diverse forms of political participation in which past generations of young Americans of all races, genders, and socioeconomic backgrounds engaged. These included strikes and civil disobedience against public and private authorities. They included paid and volunteer civil service roles as police, judges, and census takers. And they included membership in organizations from young men’s voluntary associations to literary societies that blended cultural and political expression. From well-organized campaigns to ad hoc political activism, the new media of earlier periods served as critical tools in many of these activities, with newspapers, radio, and video helping to build coalitions around specific issues that influenced the course of events.

By introducing us to these earlier generations of youth, Light invites us to reconsider claims about the novel forms of political participation offered by the technologies of the digital age. Her account spotlights trends in the history of youth political media production with relevance to contemporary theories of new media’s impact on politics—and contemporary youth activism as well. By showing us how new media used but not controlled by youth have typically provided only temporary access to the public sphere for political and cultural expression before adult gatekeepers have foreclosed these opportunities, she provides a different framework for considering the democratic potentiality of new media. Whatever democratic potentialities may reside in new media inhere not in the technologies themselves but in their disruptive force; whether those democratic potentialities will endure depends on the precise ways in which new media are domesticated. Light thus challenges analysts to take the long view, to think about new media within the broader context of the history of alternative media production, and to focus on the question of the constant evolution of the social control of communication.

In chapter 2, Youth, New Media, and the Rise of Participatory Politics, Joseph Kahne, Ellen Middaugh, and Danielle Allen initiate the effort to rework core concepts used to understand political experience. Beginning with the political itself, they argue for an expansive definition that includes extra-institutional, extra-electoral activity. They tackle the question of the relationship between culture and politics by arguing that young people are repurposing competencies and strategies that they are learning in the cultural realm for political goals. They argue that the ascendency of today’s new media may be introducing fundamental changes in political expectations and practices. Specifically, they see evidence that new media are facilitating participatory politics—interactive, peer-based acts through which individuals and groups seek not simply to express voice but also to exert influence on issues of public concern. In other words, they make a strong case for the political status of new forms of participatory engagement. Although these kinds of acts have always existed, evidence suggests that new media are providing unique opportunities for political voice, discussion, and platforms for potential influence, thus increasing the significance of participatory politics in public life. Kahne, Middaugh, and Allen identify the implications of this shift for how political life is organized, emerging political practices, and pathways to political engagement. They demonstrate the importance of participatory politics to the political lives of youth and highlight some benefits as well as risks associated with this resurgent form of political engagement.

Voice, Public Spheres, and Citizenship

The themes of voice, public spheres, and citizenship are woven through the three central parts of the book, which are divided into methodologically distinct sections: humanistic, social scientific, and normative.

In part 2, Participation Up Close: Case Studies, Tommie Shelby, Cristina Beltrán, and Wendy Chun use the methods of the humanities—close readings of texts, practices, and concepts—to dig into particular cases of youth engagement with new media. They explore participation in three distinct contexts: hip hop culture, immigration rights activism, and the leaky boundary between private and public that is the hallmark of relational life in a world of social media. Their chapters offer new perspectives on the concept of voice, the relationship between identity and political agency, and the new kinds of vulnerability that attach to participation in contexts dominated by social media.

In chapter 3, Impure Dissent: Hip Hop and the Political Ethics of Marginalized Black Urban Youth, Tommie Shelby examines the experience of black youth involved in the expressive culture of hip hop. Politically conscious hip hop music that contains various moral and political impurities is easily ignored, dismissed, even condemned. In its defense, Shelby offers some reasons for regarding political rap as valuable political expression even when it fails to satisfy the requirements of purity associated with the US civil rights movement. His concept of impure dissent pushes theoretical accounts of voice to maintain a distinction between voice as expression and voice as political action, a distinction particularly important in contexts in which there is no opportunity for exit—the ability to signal one’s critique of an organization or polity by departing and abandoning one’s membership—the conventionally recognized alternative to voice as a mechanism of response to a deteriorating situation.

In chapter 4, ‘Undocumented, Unafraid, and Unapologetic’: DREAM Activists, Immigrant Politics, and the Queering of Democracy, Cristina Beltrán concentrates on a new generation of immigration activists, the DREAMERs, to construct a definition of political belonging and action that does not depend on institutions for the achievement of efficacious political engagement. She considers how DREAM activists, particularly queer DREAM activists, use forms of new social media as a space of confrontation, creativity, and self-assertion. The essay addresses how social media facilitates new forms of political courage, agonism, and resistance and extends Shelby’s enriched account of dissent and expressive agency. Beltrán argues that the DREAMERs are bringing a new kind of citizenship into existence, one that she labels gothic.

In chapter 5, The Dangers of Transparent Friends: Crossing the Public and Intimate Spheres, Wendy Chun analyzes how basic political concepts involving conflict and collaboration, safety and vulnerability, must be rethought in a world where networks are increasingly visible and, therefore, also commodifiable, marketable, and convertible. In new media environments, friendship complicates the separation of public from private spheres. Rather than simply offering a safe space or mode of dialogue, it exposes users to more dangerous and exploitative actions. When networks can take on an existence in politics as latent publics available for political activation alongside groups, associations, and organizations, profound questions arise about the work friendship does, and the definition of the political. The looming specter of corporate control over associational life casts its shadows throughout her essay.

In part 3, Participation Out Far: Concepts and Mechanisms, Ethan Zuckerman, Archon Fung and Jennifer Shkabatur, and Danielle Allen use the generalizing methods of the social sciences to develop models and identify mechanisms that help explain how communication and political participation fit together in the context of networked digital media.

In chapter 6, Cute Cats to the Rescue?: Participatory Media and Political Expression, Ethan Zuckerman offers the definitive version of a set of ideas he has developed over time in blogosphere exchanges about structural features of the new media expressive universe that enable or hinder activists. His dual focus on governmental censorship and the importance of private companies as gatekeepers to political expression and participation clarify the possibilities and limits of the new media’s expressive power. In particular, Zuckerman explores activists’ use of popular consumer platforms including Facebook for dissenting speech. He observes how, while commercial participatory media platforms are often resilient in the face of government censorship, their constraints are shaping online political discourse—favoring some modes of expression over others.

In chapter 7, Viral Engagement: Fast, Cheap, and Broad, but Good for Democracy? Archon Fung and Jennifer Shkabatur provide a model of political action that focuses on where and how expressive power intersects with institutional decision making. In 2011 and 2012, several high-profile campaigns spread with unexpected speed and potency. These viral engagements included the mobilization that scuttled the Stop Online Piracy Act, popular protest against the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood, one hundred million views of the KONY 2012 video on YouTube (and its subsequent criticism and defense), and online activism around the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. The authors examine these viral campaigns as forms of political engagement, analyzing structures of mobilization and spread, and the potential contributions of this fast, cheap, and broad mode of engagement to democracy—specifically for democratic values of inclusion, public deliberation, political equality, and civic education.

In chapter 8, Reconceiving Public Spheres: The Flow Dynamics Model, Danielle Allen argues for a shift of focus away from spatial models of public spheres to models that start from the dynamics of discursive flows. Theorists have been debating the definition of the public sphere since antiquity and, in perhaps its most basic definition, the public sphere is taken to consist of a communicative universe that links private spaces and governmental institutions through conversations, discursive exchanges, and deliberations that both form public opinion and invoke it as the basis for legitimate public decision making. Allen’s proposal to begin from a focus on circulating streams of discourse permits development of some useful distinctions. In particular, some discursive streams, influential discourse, influence the decision-making mechanisms that define the lives of entire polities; and some streams, expressive discourse, have a more limited impact on particular communities of expression. As Allen points out, chapters 6 and 7 (those by Zuckerman and Fung and Shkabatur) make valuable contributions to identifying the mechanisms that lie beneath the distinction between expressive and influential discourse, and thereby help explain why some forms of expression become influential while others do not.

With part 4, Participatory Vistas, we turn fully toward normative questions. The opportunities presented by new media for ordinary people to achieve politically efficacious action, in collaboration with or apart from formal political institutions, raise new questions about how to define good participation. What kinds of political ethics can preserve the democratic energies that have been unleashed by the disruptive force of new media? Many of the chapters in parts 1 through 3 intertwined the empirical and the normative. As those chapters explored the specific experiences of individuals participating in a hip hop community, in immigration activism, in efforts to stop SOPA/PIPA or overthrow a regime, and in ordinary social media contexts, they also collectively assembled a set of normative criteria for assessing the health of civic agency and civic relationships: authenticity, political equality, viable nonconformist and audacious visibility, openness to social vulnerability, equal inclusion, reasonable public deliberation, effective civic education, and the value of social power as a counterbalance to corporate and governmental power. This is a capacious set of ideals for thinking about the nature of good citizenship. The interplay among the contributors to the volume strikingly reveals an emergent collective desire for civic relationships where audacious and nonconformist but also egalitarian and democratic visibility and effective public deliberation are achieved simultaneously

Each of the four chapters in the final section of this volume reverses the relationship between empirical and normative. Instead of using a normative framework to evaluate specific empirical cases and fact patterns, our contributors argue for particular ethical orientations, drawing on concrete examples to convey how ideals can be converted into material realities. Each chapter offers a distinctive vision for the normative framework that should guide citizens in the digital age. These visions are diverse and in some ways contradictory. All, however, implicitly weigh in on a question—common in the literature on new media and politics—as to whether the figure of the deliberator or of the advocate better captures the citizenly ideal that should animate our political ethics in the digital age.¹⁸ By the end of this volume, we hope to have convinced the reader that the goal should be a merger of these two visions.

In chapter 9, Pursuing Cognitive Democracy, Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi explore the capacity of networked publics to expand the range and effectiveness of democratic decision making through what they call cognitive democracy; they contrast their model to earlier hierarchical and market models of public decision making. Their paper provides one example of taking the long view: thinking about how to tap into the potentialities of new media to support a redesign of political institutions with a view to preserving the democratic energies and values described in the volume’s earlier sections. This chapter makes a strong case for a unification of agonistic and deliberative ideals.

In chapter 10, Reclaiming Disinterestedness for the Digital Era, Howard Gardner argues that healthy democracy depends on individuals, professional groups, and institutions that transcend self-interest in a narrow sense and seek to serve the common good. Although not easy to achieve, a disinterested stance, he argues, is worth striving for; societies that valorize disinterestedness are healthier than those that spurn it. Even before the advent of the digital media, American society was—by design or accident—moving away from the goal of disinterestedness. Although the proliferation of digital media could spell the death of disinterestedness, it is also possible that these media could catalyze its reemergence. Gardner advocates real and virtual common spaces to help revive such a stance. His model is more conventional, aligning with arguments that emphasize the value of deliberative rationality, but its real import is to underscore the fact that citizens play different roles at different times, and that the role of the disinterested professional serves a critical function in any sociopolitical ecosystem that seeks to preserve democratic health. While we may newly recognize the value of the self-actualizing citizenship of advocacy, we should embrace that in conjunction with understanding when and where disinterestedness’s valuable resources are also needed.

In chapter 11, Achieving Rooted Cosmopolitansim in a Digital Age, Angel Parham and Danielle Allen ask what stance we should adopt toward others who are socially, culturally, and geographically far removed from us but with whom we may in fact relatively easily interact, or with whom we may be entangled in relations of structural injustice that can now easily be made visible to us with digital tools. They argue that the cosmopolitan tradition in its sober rooted variant, best exemplified by the work of Anthony Appiah, offers a helpful framework for thinking about self-interest. At the heart of this cosmopolitan tradition is a concept of equitable self-interest in which the positive value of social relations, and the need to preserve them, is core to the content of self-interest and guides agents toward an other-regarding stance. The project of contemporary cosmopolitanism is to attach this community-preserving ideal to the global community. Parham and Allen then yoke the philosophical to the sociological in order to explore how ideals become real in the world. They argue that metamorphoses from ideal to real depend on our sociospatial imagination and on the practices and forms of social organization that consolidate our imagined social connections as lived exchanges. The question for cosmopolitans, in the networked digital age, is whether it is possible, prospectively and drawing on the affordances of new media, to cultivate the sociospatial imagination, relational practices, and accompanying forms of social organization necessary to instantiate rooted cosmopolitanism widely.

Finally, in chapter 12, Acting Politically in a Digital Age, Noëlle McAfee makes an argument that ordinary citizens should reclaim the mantle of being political actors; in contrast to the panelists at the Future of Entertainment conference mentioned above, we needn’t shy away from that label. Drawing on work from Hannah Arendt and Benjamin Barber, McAfee seeks to provide an account of the meaning of politics, publics, and the public sphere, and subsequently to lay out the main tasks for a democratic public aspiring to a healthy democracy: identifying problems, deliberating, making choices, and forming public will. McAfee examines how new media are being used—and might be used—to carry out this work, and argues for the importance of new media users seeing themselves as citizens rather than as voters, protesters, or consumers. Like Farrell and Shalizi, she offers a model of citizenship for the context of a new media-enabled participatory politics; but she criticizes their model for paying too much attention to the value of participation for solving problems and not enough to the role of participation in identifying and contesting the problems that should be on the agenda in the first place. She also makes the case that only by providing alternatives to corporate-made communicative options can we develop the forms of social power necessary to counterbalance governmental and corporate power.

Our Working Method

This is not a conventional edited volume—the product, for instance, of a single conference at which participants arrived with completed papers and then edited them modestly for publication. This project emerged, first, out of the identification of a grand challenge too big for any single scholar or discipline to address—the relation between shifts in the media landscape and changes in sociopolitical relations—and, second, from the constitution of a team of scholars with diverse expertise to address it. We turned out also to be, in some important ways, a team of rivals with durable disagreements. We disagreed, for example, about the value and dangers of commercial versus noncommercial platforms for speech, and about how to understand the importance of physical spaces as components of the public sphere. Our most vigorous disagreements concerned the issues of advocacy and deliberation: whether these activities are compatible or in tension and which of these—or neither or both—should be at the center of civic education for a new generation. On this last point, the volume itself ultimately moves toward revisions to both concepts—advocacy and deliberation—so that they can live and work together. In other words, we reject what has become a common dichotomy in the literature on new media and politics between the dutiful citizen and the self-actualizing citizen.¹⁹ We conceive of citizens who can be self-actualizing and even gothic in some moments and roles, yet who will also recognize the occasions that call for disinterestedness or dutiful action.

Contributors met three times over the course of eighteen months for extended conversations running through multiple days. At our first meeting we began by formulating questions together. We used our second meeting to present drafts of papers developed in response to our initial conversations, and to reflect directly on the three themes that had emerged from our initial conversation. We reconsidered our essays and revised. We used our third meeting, then, for synthetic discussion—to trace the points of convergence and dissonance within our essays and to come to a clearer understanding of their theoretical implications. And we continued our conversations in cyberspace. We have noted the points of disagreement here. The section introductions and conclusion to the volume will trace the convergences.

In its merger of the empirical and the normative, this volume exemplifies a working method that we think is important for the future of the social sciences generally. As empirical scholars develop their descriptive accounts, they inevitably do so with reference at the very least to implicit ideals. The questions of what works or of how something works cannot escape consideration in light of our aspirations. Good work in the social sciences, then, will be self-conscious about the role of ideals in directing the critical gaze of the empirical scholar. Good work will make implicit ideals explicit. But then scholars must also be self-conscious about the source of those ideals, and critical with regard to their caliber. Ideals are most valuable when they develop closely bound to direct analysis of their consequences for lived human relations and material social relations. The work of building and assessing ideals itself requires delving into social realities.²⁰ In this volume, we have, in short, employed a two-step analytic method, which we recommend as a way forward for other hard questions in the social sciences. Importantly, this two-step analytic method is perhaps best practiced as a collective endeavor. Such teamwork is what we have sought to achieve here.

Part I

Toward Participatory Politics

How are civic relationships changing against the backdrop of networked digital communication? How do novel expressive possibilities intersect with shifts in political identities and even in the very definition of politics? To begin to answer those questions, one must start with historical perspectives. In chapter 1, Putting Our Conversation in Context, Jennifer S. Light takes us through a century