This a collaborative post on the project Sayamindu Dasgupta and I have been working on.

Focusing on Real-Life Community Issues
In a past project update, we surveyed a number of cases in the Scratch Online Community where Scratch members expressed civic engagement through the interactive media projects they shared. One of our research questions asks, “When young people use a media creation and sharing community to engage in civic discourse and expression with their community and their peers, what does that look like?”

While we shared a number of cases that addressed issues beyond the Scratch community (current politics, responses to natural disasters) and within (opposition to community policies and dissent), we decided to focus on issues beyond the Scratch community. Because we are members of the Scratch design and administration team, which involves formulation, discussion and implementation of online community policies, we felt we were too biased to examine issues related to the community. We believe there is still rich exploration in cases related to real-world community issues and we look forward to sharing them.

Literature on youth civic engagement with digital media

We began our literature review with a number of articles from the book Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth. We found the articles a great summary of research that describes the changing landscape of youth civic engagement with the use of digital media. It also describes what key players such as policy makers, educators, community organizations, and young people can learn and do to empower young people to become engaged citizens. We found this book a good starting point to find additional articles to expand our literature review, which we enumerate at the end of this post.

Bennett, W. L. (2008) Changing citizenship in the digital age. In Bennett, W.L. (Ed.), Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth (1-14). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Bennett explains the changing needs and perspectives of young people in democratic societies. Youth are being turned off by current state of politics and engaging less in traditional arenas, however they are expressing civic engagement in networking and friendship sites like MySpace and MMORPGs. He argues that key players such as policy makers, media, educators, and young people interested in youth civic engagement must “expand their notions of politics and what is political as youth push the boundaries of what these mean with their use of digital media.” He suggests how what these key players can learn from and do within the changing landscape.
Bennett talks about two models of youth engagement: engaged youth and disengaged youth. Engaged youth or active engagement “emphasizes empowerment of youth as expressive individuals and symbolically frees young people to make their own creative choices” independent of conventional government. Disengaged youth or passive engagement “acknowledges the rise of more autonomous forms of public expression such as consumer politics, or the occasional protest on MySpace, while keeping the focus on the generational decline in connections to government (e.g. voting patterns) and general civic involvement as threats to the health of democracy itself”
Civic education remains a textbook experience and does not help learners develop skills necessary to become engaged citizens nor does it connect to youth’s experienced in a networked world.
Compares the traditional civic education ideal of the Dutiful Citizen versus the emerging youth experience of self-actualizing citizenship (see table 1 in paper, pg. 14) The Dutiful Citizen feels an obligation to participate in government centered activities; sees voting core act; feel responsible to be informed; and joins civil society organizations or parties. The Actualizing Citizen feels less obligated, but has a higher sense of individual purpose; sees voting as less meaningful than more personal acts like volunteering, consumerism; has mistrust of media and politicians; and favors loose networks of community action such as friendship networks maintained by CMC.

Rheingold, H. (2008) Using participatory media and public voice to encourage civic engagement. In Bennett, W.L. (Ed.), Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth (97-118). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Rheingold talks about the importance of the “public voice”, and how, online civic discourse and engagement can enable teenagers to develop their identity.
He refers to danah boyd’s idea of “digital publics” for teenagers, where “digital technologies allow youth to (re)create private and public youth space while physically in controlled spaces. IM (instant message) serves as a private space while MySpace provide a public component. Online, youth can build the environments that support youth socialization.”
He also talks about specific participatory media technologies and practices (wikis, blogging, etc), some of which are already popular among teenagers, and how they can be used to build a twenty-first century civic curriculum.

Raynes-Goldie, K. and Walker, L. Our space: Online civic engagement tools for youth. In Bennett, W.L. (Ed.), Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth (161-188). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

This paper describes a website TakingITGlobal, an online community that provides youth with tools, information, and networking to create and manage their own community projects.
Designers of TakingITGlobal believe in bridging both online and offline spaces that young people occupy to effect change in their communities, instead of trying to use online interactions to replace offline interactions.

We also looked at some numbers about teenage participation online, especially in the context of civic activism. According to a September 2009 survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, 93% of American teenagers use the Internet. According to another study by the same group, conducted in February 2008, “teens who take part in social interaction related to the game, such as commenting on websites or contributing to discussion boards, are more engaged civically and politically.” An older MTV study of American teenagers, conducted from December 2005 to April 2006 found that “with 70% believing in the importance of helping the community, 68% already doing something to support a cause on a monthly basis and 82% describing themselves at least ‘somewhat involved,’ it’s clear that the majority of young people are convinced that supporting a social cause is something they should do.”

Apart from the literature cited above, over this week, we also plan to look at the following book-chapter and article for more recent and specific insights into youth civic engagement online.

Coleman, Stephen. “Doing IT for Themselves: Management versus Autonomy in Youth E-Citizenship.” Civic Life Online: Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth. Edited by W. Lance Bennett. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008. 189–206. doi: 10.1162/dmal.9780262524827.189
Chris Wells (2010): “Citizenship and Communication in Online Youth Civic Engagement Projects”, Information, Communication & Society, 13:3, 419-441