My name is Sayamindu, and I’m a graduate student in the MAS (Media Arts and Sciences) program here at MIT. In the past I have been involved in a number of Free and Open Source projects, and currently I’m involved in a Media Lab project called Scratch where kids can create and remix interactive media (games, animations, stories, etc) through programming, and share them online. In some ways, I have been an “in the trenches” member of a participatory, shared interest driven culture, and now I try to study and understand a somewhat similar (though much smaller) community¹. Something that interests me in the world of Scratch are projects and conversations that deal with bigger issues outside of the community. These issues range from US politics (example project) to cruelty to animals (example project). My immediate interest (that immediately popped up when I saw this course in the catalog) is exploring this particular aspect of the Scratch community, but in general I’m also interested in the wider space of Civic Media. That brings us to the question of “What is Civic Media?”
A theme that seems to resonate throughout the various descriptions of and discussions about Civic Media is participation and democracy – participation by the people, in a community that is for the people. Echoing the Knight Foundation report “Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age”, I see Civic Media as a set of tools, technologies and practices that enable wider and more active participation in a democratic process. Example of such participation include the recent movements in the Middle East, the anti-corruption movement in India, etc.
Civic Media enables ordinary citizens to be more involved in the synthesis and curation of public knowledge. This can be in the form of making sense of large datasets (example: the recent crowdsourced parsing of WikiLeaks data), filtering and curation of news items for a particular community (example: Reddit), or simply taking up the role of a traditional journalist (example: WikiNews). This is also usually accompanied by discussions and dialog around the resultant artifacts or “media objects”. The effect of these discussions is usually raised awareness around a certain topic, but I would argue that they also increase the sense of participation around the issue. This sense affects not only the participants, but also, often, it creates enough of a critical mass to influence the decision of higher authorities (such as the government). For example, during the recent anti-corruption movement in India, one of the leaders of the movement, Anna Hazare was arrested and sent to judicial custody for 7 days on “preventive” grounds. However, due to mass-scale protests (which were amplified and transmitted through various forms of media, both traditional and new), the government backtracked on the decision and freed him within 24 hours. Most of these protests were of not backed by traditional political parties, but were organized spontaneously through word of mouth, text messages and both social and traditional media.
The anti-corruption movement in India also brought forward the issue of expression. From a personal perspective, I could see people whom I had not previously considered to be politically inclined or even aware, expressing their views vociferously on blogs, facebook posts, twitter updates, etc. The Civic Media tools had provided them with the means to be aware, form an opinion, and ultimately express themselves in front of a wider audience, in the process, opening up their thoughts for discussion and counter-arguments. Of course, this makes the pressing issue of equal access to these tools even more important, and some have argued that the anti-corruption movement in India took into account the voices of only those who were well off enough to be heard.
Expression can happen online and offline, and I must confess that I hadn’t really thought about the offline aspects and possibilities of Civic Media before coming to this class. An example of a contemporary participatory community that reflects the some of the aspects of Civic Media I have mentioned before is the Computer Clubhouse. In the 2009 paper, “Origins and Guiding Principles of the Computer Clubhouse”, the authors highlight the interest driven and community based foundations of the Computer Clubhouse program. Another very important guiding principle behind the Clubhouse is the need for an environment of “Respect and Trust”. This is echoed in the Knight Foundation white-paper “5 Strategies to Revive Civic Communication”, where it is pointed out that the anonymity offered by the Internet, while sometimes useful, can also lead to “disastrous results” for online dialogs (“Strategy 3: Invest in face-to-face public deliberation”), as people tend to behave very differently when they are anonymous.
So to conclude, for me, Civic Media is defined by a set of keywords/phrases, listed below:
- participation
- democracy
- community
- synthesis and curation of public knowledge
- discussion and dialog
- expression
- online and offline
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[1] A lot of people, when given a description of the Scratch online community for the first time, exclaim, “Oh, then this is like Open Source for kids!”.