In my “hello world” post for this blog, I tried to define Civic Media as

…a set of tools, technologies and practices that enable wider and more active participation in a democratic process.

While writing this post, I remember trying to unpack the concept of “democratic process”, but I wasn’t sure about how to go about it. I talked about the “curation and synthesis of public knowledge” and the importance of expression, but it felt that there needed to be a clearer distinction between what was to me, the “traditional” democratic process, and the processes that I would typically think of in the context of the civic media landscape.

There is a shift in the democratic process – that was clear through a number of class discussions and readings. Discussions about networked counterpublics, for example, covered the transformation of public spheres through the network, a process that was followed by a further shift to media ecologies. New and emergent tools (starting from the now ancient telegraph, as illustrated by James Carey[1]) have and are powering new practices (such as Anonymous’s hacktivism, described by Gabriella Coleman[2]), which in turn are, I would argue, giving rise to a new kind of participation in the democratic process.

Bennett et al.[3] articulate this difference through the lens of citizenship, and draws a distinction between what they call dutiful citizenship, and actualizing citizenship (thanks to Ricarose for sending this article to me!). In dutiful citizenship, they describe, “individuals participate in civic life through organized groups, from civic clubs to political parties, while becoming informed via the news, and generally engaging in public life out of a sense of personal duty.” The defining characteristics of actualizing citizenship, on the other hand, are “looser personal engagement with peer networks that pool (crowd source) information” and participation in “civic action using social technologies that maximize individual expression.” I feel that this is the most compelling framework for me.

In terms of spaces for intervention, again, referring to my first blog post, I feel that access is a major area to think about. Interestingly though, when I wrote about access in that post, I was thinking about access for civic media producers. Over the course of the class, I have come to realize that there are two ways of looking at access. If we look at civic media as a participatory process, we need to consider access for the producers (which I talked about), but also access for the audience (I should mention here that since this is a participatory process, in many situations the boundary between producer/audience is quite blurred). An example of this kind of situation is pointed out by Ethan Zuckerman in “Four Questions about Civic Media”, where during the Iran protests, external supporters changed their location to Tehran, making it difficult to identify the actual tweeters on ground, inside Iran. It’s important to understand that the voices from ground that are reaching out are not necessarily the full representative voice of a given movement (something that was pointed out during the course of class). Sometimes the reason behind this is lack of access for the participants in the movement, and sometimes, the reason is lack of access to the actual participants in the movement. Both of these can, at worst, have negative consequences and and best, paint an incomplete picture.

References

James Carey, “Technology and Ideology: the Case of the Telegraph.” In Communication as Culture.
Gabriella Coleman, “Anonymous: From the Lulz to Collective Action.”
Bennett, W. L., Wells, C. and Freelon, D. (2011), Communicating Civic Engagement: Contrasting Models of Citizenship in the Youth Web Sphere. Journal of Communication, 61: 835–856. doi: 10.1111/j.1460-2466.2011.01588.x