Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Eric Gordon
Started reading
August 17, 2018
Civic engagement, in this regard, expands beyond its traditional manifestations of voting, paying taxes, volunteerism, and town meeting attendance, and comes to represent the texture of everyday life—the interface among individuals, their communities, and public institutions.
To this end, the civic in civic media is not merely about outcomes, but about process and potential. It is about the mechanics of acting in the world with the tools and conditions available. Civic media, then, are any mediated practice that enables a community to imagine themselves as being connected, not through achieving, but through striving for common good.
miraculous encounter between players and systems and the
As youth generate a growing dependence on social networks to facilitate communication and sense of belonging (Deuze 2006; Christakis 2011; Turkle 2012), they also develop a sense of agency that exists outside of the traditional structures of civic life
Citizenship and education are tied to media literacies because civic life is composed of the skills and dispositions that young people use to engage with media for personal and public means. As the spaces for formal education have trouble keeping pace with technological advancements (Rheingold, 2012), how students learn to participate in civic life becomes a question of increasing importance, and that is less dependent on formal schooling alone. Education scholar Renee Hobbs summarized the aims of media and digital literacy in a report for the Aspen Foundation, in which she highlights the need
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What work is required to ensure that opportunities to engage in participatory politics are equitably distributed among youth including those marginalized from digital and other forms of privilege?
write, “to promote democracy in a diverse society, civic technology must design for civic inclusion instead of civic engagement.” McDowell and Chinchilla understand civic inclusion as a designed process where “all individuals learn to engage with established organizational structures, and that institutions become adept in serving an increasingly heterogeneous membership.” To make this argument, they provide an action research perspective through
research. When funders want immediate results, or specific uses of data, researchers and their institutions tend to accommodate, potentially compromising the quality of research and its potential impact.
we could sit in that uneasy position between making things, impacting communities, and producing knowledge. 5
Civic media are all the technologies, designs, and practices that connect people to government, institutions, and more generally, the practice and promise of contemporary democracy.
Zuckerman, E. 2013. Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitanism
perennial. A third challenge is inequality. Democracy means equal voice, but there are many sources of inequality, including differences in social standing and prestige as well as in expertise, skill, and commitment. I would especially emphasize what Charles Lindblom called “the privileged position of business” (Lindblom 1977). People and firms that can make substantial investments have more influence in a democracy than individuals who must simply
The Internet and other digital media have not changed the list of fundamental issues. Instead, the new media affect these issues in varied and unpredictable ways. Still,
The Internet is thus a continuation of longer-term shifts from duty to choice and from loyalty to information.
networks have become more important, and organizations less so, because digital media have cut transaction costs. The question is whether networks can achieve the political purposes of
1954, 186). The Panopticon’s cells have three walls, so that the prisoners cannot communicate
