Читать книгу By Any Media Necessary - Henry Jenkins - Страница 8

1

Youth Voice, Media, and Political Engagement

Introducing the Core Concepts

Henry Jenkins

Sorry, it appears your system either does not support video playback or cannot play the MP4 format provided.

Zombies/Activists/Fans

Fall 2011. An army of people dressed as zombies—many of them from Zombiecon—a New York City horror fan convention—had just disembarked from a big yellow school bus at Washington Square Park, then the home base for Occupy Wall Street. The zombie had emerged as one of many key symbols of the Occupy movement—standing in for “undead corporations” that were sucking the lifeblood of the 99 percent, soulless executives who had lost their humanity in pursuit of capital. Elderly tourists (mostly little old ladies) with cell phone cameras were stopping the zombies to pose for selfies and attempt to better understand their strange costumes, resulting in a series of exchanges that would further spread awareness of the protests. You could see the seniors (not to mention the zombies themselves and other protesters) texting, tweeting, and sending photos or videos. Passing the word was the point; Occupy was less a movement than a provocation (Trope and Swartz 2011). Its goals were primarily discursive; Occupy sought to shift how the American public thought about inequalities of wealth. Occupy’s goals were also spatial: to reclaim public spaces for public purposes. And the little old ladies questioning the zombies were part of the process, spreading the word via each of their social networks.

This is what democracy looks like in the 21st century—yet another shift in the evolving image-bank through which Americans collectively imagine the prospects of social change. The Cultural Front in the 1930s sought to influence the development of popular culture, giving rise to Aaron Copland, Norman Rockwell, Frank Capra, and many others (Denning 1998). The most traditional (and now often banal) images of American democracy draw on symbols that took shape during this period. The protest movements of the 1960s also tried to tap into the languages of popular culture—especially those of rock and comics—to create a counterculture, one which was implicitly and often explicitly critical of corporately owned media. As Fred Turner (2008) and Aaron Delwiche (2013) suggest, our current cyberculture built on the foundations of the 1960s counterculture, giving rise to the rhetoric of digital revolution. The protest movements of the early 1990s embraced a DIY aesthetic, inspired the indie media movement, and employed culture jamming as a way of “blocking the flow” of concentrated media. Adbusters, a key culture jamming organization, begat Occupy, but Occupy pushed beyond their rhetorical practices.

Even painted in such broad strokes, one can see an ongoing process through which young people have refreshed and renewed the public’s symbolic power as they fight for social justice; they often push back against inherited forms and search for new mechanisms for asserting their voice. Occupy, like other recent protest movements, tapped pop culture to express participants’ collective identities and frame their critiques. Thus a more playful style of activism is emerging through this appropriative and transformative dimension of participatory culture. Images and stories from superhero comics or cult television series are not only a shared reference among participants but also will be understood by a larger public. So the activists dressed up, created their own videos, and shared those videos on YouTube, where they were seen by many who were not going to Washington Square, Los Angeles City Hall, or any other Occupation site. These various activities offer examples of what this book is calling participatory politics. Participatory politics might be described as that point where participatory culture meets political and civic participation, where political change is promoted through social and cultural mechanisms rather than through established political institutions, and where citizens see themselves as capable of expressing their political concerns—often through the production and circulation of media. Throughout this book, we will be considering examples of innovative organizations and networks that have deployed mechanisms of participatory practice to help young people enter the political process. And we will identify alternative models for the political process that respond to or suggest a way to move past what some have described as a crisis in American democracy.

By Any Media Necessary seeks to address a core contradiction. On the one hand, there is a widespread perception that: the institutions historically associated with American democracy are dysfunctional, public trust in core institutions is eroding, civic organizations no longer bring us together, elected representatives are more beholden to big contributors than to voters, electoral processes have been rigged to protect incumbents and to disqualify minority and youth participants, periodic government shutdowns and budget crisis reflect a core impasse between the two parties in Washington, the mass media is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a dwindling number of conglomerates, the news we are receiving is sharply biased by those same partisan interests, surveillance invades our privacy and intimidates would-be political participants, and very little is likely to emerge at the level of institutional politics that is going to shift those conditions very much. Whew! On the other hand, we have seen an expansion of the communicative and organizational resources available to everyday people (and grassroots organizations) as we become more and more accustomed to using networked communications toward our collective interests. You will not understand this book unless you see both of these two claims as largely true, with grassroots media being deployed as the tool by which to challenge the failed mechanisms of institutional politics.

In Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age, Manuel Castells (2012) describes a range of political movements from the indignadas in Spain to the “Arab Spring” uprisings to Occupy Wall Street that deployed grassroots expression and networked communication to construct a new political imaginary. Castells writes, “Since the institutional public space, the institutionally designated space for deliberation, is occupied by the interests of the dominant elites and their networks, social movements need to carve out a new public space that is not limited to the Internet, but makes itself visible in the spaces of public life” (10). Castells makes three core claims. First, such spaces create a strong sense of community, forging social bonds and collective identities between participants. Second, such occupied spaces become sites for imagining alternatives, generating new symbols, reconnecting with historical memories, and testing and refining new rhetorics, often in a highly accelerated fashion. And, third, these encampments became “spaces of deliberation,” testing new models for debate, collaboration, and collective decision making. Such sites enable rapid innovation on the level of social formations, personal and collective identities, rhetorics and symbols, and deliberative mechanisms and processes. And networked communication empowers the rapid diffusion of those innovations.1

The American public desperately needs to find ways to make the government work on its behalf, since many of the core issues—such as citizenship rights for undocumented youth or an end to racialized police violence—are questions that involve the relationship between citizens and the state. But many of today’s grassroots organizations believe that the most effective way to put pressure on the government is through the exercise of expressive and discursive power—through education and cultural change—rather than necessarily through the ballot box. In Counter-Democracy, Pierre Rosanvallon (2008) describes the various mechanisms by which citizens in Western democratic countries have sought to hold their governments accountable for working within and preserving the infrastructure of democracy. He argues that new political practices have expanded in response to growing skepticism toward governments and disengagement with institutional forms of politics:

For some time now, political scientists have tried to identify unconventional forms of participation, which may have increased in number as the rate of participation in elections declined. The number of people participating in strikes or demonstrations, signing petitions and expressing collective solidarity in other ways suggests that the age is not one of political apathy and that the notion that people are increasingly withdrawing into the private sphere is not correct. It is better to say that citizenship has changed in nature rather than declined. There has been a simultaneous diversification of the range, forms, and targets of political expression. As political parties eroded, various types of advocacy groups and associations developed. Major institutions of representation and bargaining saw their roles diminish as ad hoc organizations proliferated. Citizens now have many more ways of expressing their grievances and complaints other than voting. (19)

Understanding these new mechanisms of political participation is central to this book’s project.

Ethan Zuckerman (forthcoming) has asked his readers to take a long, hard look at these new mechanisms of political participation in order to better understand their underlying models of change and to assess which may be the most effective means of achieving particular goals: “If I care about racial justice, should I work to elect candidates from a particular political party, run for local office, participate in a march, write an op-ed or a blog post? Given my skills, capabilities and time, am I likely to be effective in bringing about the changes I wish to see through a given civic act?” To address these questions, Zuckerman contrasts the different tactics protestors used in the immediate aftermath of the police shooting of unarmed black teen Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. Zuckerman notes the complex interplay between traditional forms of street protest and social media responses designed to direct greater attention onto what had happened: “The protests in the streets documented online, and the online protests calling attention to events in the streets represent some of the ways in which civic media—the use of participatory media technologies for civic participation, political engagement or social change—has become a routine part of protest movements, opening participation in protests far beyond those physically present.”

Much like Occupy, Ferguson and subsequent protests against racialized police violence have generated new political symbols, tactics, and frames. Anusha Kedhar (2014), for example, has described the ways that the “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot” gesture has been performed not only in the streets of Ferguson but around the world as an expression of solidarity and as a means of embodying a particular subjectivity: “The hands up don’t shoot slogan implores the protestor not only to stand in solidarity with Michael Brown by re-enacting his last movements, but also to empathize by embodying his final corporeal act of agency. As a collective gesture, it compels us to take note of and publicly acknowledge the bodily proof of Michael Brown’s innocence.” Under the hashtag #iftheygunnedmedown, African Americans were encouraged to share contrasting photographs of themselves in different personas—dressed for work or graduation or military service as opposed to more casual street clothes—as a means of calling out how the news media’s selection of such images for publication can dramatically shape the public’s perception of Brown or others involved in police violence. This campaign allowed dispersed supporters to feel connected to the protest, offering a template for what meaningful participation might look like and identifying others who shared a similar worldview. The use of such tactics also reflects a growing awareness of the ways protestors have been able to coalesce and mobilize quickly via social media.2

Zuckerman argues that such social media campaigns often seek to change media representations as a means of shaping public perceptions and social norms. Such a model of change, Zuckerman argues, underlies many efforts to deploy social media because this approach builds upon the social affiliations and cultural practices many young people use on a daily basis. Such campaigns, he suggests, are easy to execute but hard to assess: “It’s one thing to measure how many millions of Facebook users changed their profile photo to the logo of an equality campaign, and another to determine whether those profile changes led to a change in public acceptance of equal marriage rights.” Moreover, such messages risk adding more clutter to an already vast media landscape, as citizens are pulled and tugged by many such efforts.

As we are writing, protests around the U.S. and around the world are escalating amid a growing awareness of a pattern of similar incidents in which black bodies have been subjected to brutal and discriminatory police force. We still do not know how effective these various tactics will be in sustaining an ongoing social justice movement; we also do not know by what criteria we should appraise their effectiveness. Rather than burning out, there are some signs that each of these campaigns has fueled the next (with the #BlackLivesMatter campaign following from the Trayvon Martin death helping to inspire the responses in Ferguson), adding new symbols and gestures to the mix (such as the choking “I can’t breathe” imagery associated with the death of Eric Garner, another black man, caught in a lethal police chokehold), and tapping mounting public frustration and rage. Whether this effort alters police practices or not will depend both on the ability of the mostly young civil rights leaders to transform a series of local causes into the basis for an ongoing movement, and on whether government officials are prepared to acknowledge and respond to these protestors. How do we weigh the impact of public awareness campaigns against the refusal of multiple grand juries to take legal action?

Throughout this book, we will be exploring in what senses these kinds of expressive practices might be politically meaningful, both for those who participate (for whom benefits might include developing their voices and skills as citizens) and for those who receive such messages (for whom benefits might include gaining access to alternative perspectives to those represented through more mainstream media channels). We also will call attention to some of the risks and limits of these particular tactics, and the model of change that inform them, as we sort through this underlying tension among an increasingly unresponsive government, a public with an expanded communicative capacity, and an emerging generation seeking to change the world.

A Crisis in Youth Participation?

In this book, the term “youth” refers to people in their teens or twenties. It defines not simply a stage of physiological or psychological development, but also a stage in the process of acquiring the skills necessary for political participation at an age where there is less than complete access to the rights of citizenship. This group includes high school students, who may not yet be eligible to vote, and college students and young adults, who do not yet have the right to run for many elective offices. That said, we regard the political work these young people are doing not simply as preparatory for adult roles but also meaningful on its own terms as an intervention into core debates of our time. We find that young people sometimes begin getting involved with these causes in their high school years and may be providing organizational leadership by their late twenties, suggesting a kind of ecology of participation that was important to capture through our research. The idea that people in this category have a distinct political identity is evoked by the popular 1960s slogan “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” But it is also signaled by various other political discourses about youth that dismiss young people for not embracing what older people see as appropriate forms of civic and political participation.

While our focus here is on youth, keep in mind that some of the organizations we study allow for cross-generational participation around shared interests and common goals. Also, we are looking at networks of young people who are coming of age at a particular historical, cultural, and technological juncture, and our analysis deals with their current political and civic lives, rather than some universalized notion of child development or idea of a generational identity that will remain fixed throughout the rest of their lives. We do not know what kinds of political lives these people will lead as they grow older, so our focus is on what they are doing now and not what kind of people they are becoming.

Youth are often seen as emblematic of the crisis in democracy—represented as apathetic about institutional politics, ill-informed about current affairs, and unwilling to register and vote. Peter Levine (2006) identifies a number of flaws in this narrative:

The narrative of decline overlooks creative developments, often led by youth, that may be building the foundations of civil society in the twenty-first century.… The decline story overlooks that various subpopulations engage on issues of special concern to them.… It overlooks certain positive trends in youth engagement, such as a steep rise in volunteering rate in the United States.… It treats a withdrawal from major institutions (such as elections and the press) as a decline, when these trends may actually reflect growing sophistication. Perhaps youth are deliberately and wisely choosing not to endorse forms of participation that are flawed. (15)

In short, Levine suggests, youth may be pursuing politics through different means than have historically been acknowledged within research on institutional politics or social movements. Scholars need new approaches for studying American public life, approaches that acknowledge and work past the core contradiction between dysfunctional governance and the public’s expanded expressive capacity. Melissa Brough and Sangita Shresthova (2012) explain this point of view:

Over the last several decades, younger generations in particular have become civically and politically engaged in new and different ways, related less to electoral politics or government or civic organizations and more to personal interests, social networks, and cultural or commodity activism (a form of protest that is typically levied against private companies rather than governments). These modes of political participation are often enacted through informal, noninstitutionalized, nonhierarchical networks in and around the Internet (Bennett 2008[b]; Ito et al. 2009; Jenkins et al. 2006; Kahne, [Lee, and Feezell] 2011). They are political insofar as they aim to influence or change existing power relations.

Many American youth are making calculated choices that they may be more effective at bringing about change through educational or cultural mechanisms than through electoral or institutional means and through a consensus rather than partisan approach—addressing social problems on levels where voluntary actions can make a difference. Such a response is not irrational. Over the last two presidential cycles, there have been dramatic increases in voting by youth, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, American Muslims, and a range of other groups, which is often cited as a key factor in Obama’s victories. However, these shifts in political engagement have not translated into much congressional action on behalf of the issues that matter most to these constituencies. What progress has been made has occurred through executive decree, court decisions, or shifting public attitudes.

W. Lance Bennett (2008a) talks about some of these shifts in terms of “the empowerment of youth as expressive individuals” (2). Here, though, we want to stress their collective—rather than individual—dimensions. As Castells (2012) suggests, political change is being forged through social and political networks that come together online and in physical space to explore new possibilities. We discuss those shifts from a perspective of cautious optimism. We want to document these new cultural mechanisms for political change: how they are working in practice for particular youth involved within specific organizations and how these practices may be forcing us to rethink what “counts” as politics. While we are skeptical of change occurring in the short term through the mechanisms of institutional politics, we are intrigued by political, social, and cultural changes occurring around the edges of the dominant institutions, as young people work together to address issues that matter to them.

Mainstream journalism has tended to dismiss these new kinds of tactics as “clicktivism,” but the central thesis of this book is that there is something bigger going on here that cannot be described in relation to a single platform. These young people are seeking to change the world through any media necessary. For Occupy, for instance, this meant connecting their struggle to everything from V for Vendetta (Guy Fawkes masks) to Sesame Street (“99 percent of the world’s cookies go to 1 percent of the monsters”) and translating those messages into “memes,” documentary videos, public projections, street theater, and body art, among many other media practices. But the highly visible activities of Occupy are simply the tip of the iceberg, reflecting a much broader array of youth-driven movements actively promoting political change.

Meme from Occupy Wall Street movement.

We do not mean to imply that all young people are a uniform group of so-called digital natives, equally comfortable with the possibilities of using networked communications to spread their messages. We share the concerns danah boyd (2012) raises when she writes that the Kony 2012 campaign illustrates inequalities in the current communication context: “The fact that privileged folks—including white American youth—can spread messages like this is wonderful, but my hunch is that they’re structurally positioned to spread information farther and wider than those who are socially marginalized.” Such systemic and structural inequalities remain a real limit to this emerging style of politics, even as new media tactics are also deployed by American Muslims or undocumented immigrants, youth who are more “socially marginalized.” In our work, we’ve discovered young activists who have overcome enormous difficulties in gaining access to the means of cultural production and circulation: from bloggers who did not own their own computers to filmmakers who did not own their own cameras and who relied on community centers and public libraries for digital access. Some groups have easy access to the skills, knowledge, resources, and social connections that enable them to exert their voice into public affairs in a way that is meaningful and effective. Others—especially many of those economically deprived, socially marginalized, historically disempowered—do not.

Who We Are

In 2009 the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation established the multidisciplinary Youth and Participatory Politics (YPP) Research Network, focused on better understanding these issues. This YPP network, led by Joseph Kahne (Mills College), was part of the foundation’s digital media and learning initiatives, which have resulted in a wide array of white papers, reports, and book-length publications—as well as an international conference, launched in 2010, which annually attracts more than 1,200 participants. The YPP network’s efforts includes a large-scale quantitative survey, conducted by Joseph Kahne and Cathy J. Cohen, documenting the political lives of American youth with a strong emphasis on the quantity, quality, and equality of their new media practices, as well as more qualitative efforts to understand different forms of political participation. Network participants also include Danielle Allen (who has edited a collection of essays reexamining the ways the internet has impacted classic understandings of publics and counterpublics), Howard Gardner (whose Good Participation project has been interviewing young people who are involved in traditional political organizations and volunteer service organizations), Jennifer Earl (who has been documenting new forms of protests and online petitions), Lissa Soep (who has been exploring the platforms and practices that might help young people become more involved in participatory politics), Elyse Eidman-Aadahl (who has been engaging educators as they think through new forms of civics and writing instruction that may help young people discover their political voice), and Ethan Zuckerman (who has been developing case studies exploring best practices drawn from social movements from around the world).

A subset of this larger research network, the Media, Activism, and Participatory Politics (MAPP) research team at the University of Southern California, has developed case studies of innovative networks and organizations that have deployed participatory politics to get young people involved in efforts to heighten public awareness and promote social change. Altogether, we’ve interviewed several hundred young activists drawn from the following efforts:

 Invisible Children (IC), an organization founded in 2005 and dedicated to ending the human rights violations perpetrated by warlord Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army. IC stumbled into the global limelight when they released Kony 2012, a 30-minute film that broke YouTube’s viewership records.

 The Harry Potter Alliance, a nonprofit organization also established in 2005, which encourages civic and political engagement by using metaphors from J. K. Rowling’s best-selling fantasy series. The name Imagine Better is used for HPA’s efforts to expand its outreach to engage with a range of other fan communities, including those around The Hunger Games and Superman. HPA exists in a loose affiliation with Nerdfighters, a YouTube community that initially formed through videos exchanged between vlogging brothers Hank and John Green.

 The youth networks connected to the Muslim Public Affairs Council and Muslim Youth Group based at the Islamic Center of Southern California, which engage American Muslim identities by encouraging expression and community-focused civic identity formation in a post-9/11 climate.

 The network-based, undocumented youth commonly referred to as DREAMers who engage in immigrant rights organizing and activism to achieve legislative reform.

 Students for Liberty (SFL), a group based in libertarian economic and social theories that has recently advocated for an expansion of “second-wave libertarianism.”

Research for this book was conducted over a period of six years and included interviews, participant observation, and media content analysis. Our selection of the cases referenced above reflected an initial desire to look at groups defined around brands (Invisible Children), fan interests (Harry Potter Alliance, Imagine Better, and the Nerdfighters), faith-based communities (American Muslims), identity politics (DREAMers), and shared ideological and philosophical commitments (Students for Liberty). Yet, these frames broke down as we discovered each of these groups was more diverse in its background, goals, and beliefs than anticipated. While Invisible Children does use many sophisticated branding techniques to rally its supporters, we rarely heard IC members speaking of the group in those terms; many of them saw their involvement with the group as part of a much larger commitment to human rights advocacy. While Harry Potter Alliance, Imagine Better, and the Nerdfighters do build on the infrastructure and shared cultural knowledge of fandom, we also found participants who had joined because of their political commitments and who were not particularly fans of the media content being discussed. We found that American Muslim youth were seeking to change their shared cultural identity. We saw that that both American Muslim youth and DREAMers are, as groups, much more ethnically and racially diverse than many might have anticipated, and thus that both are committed to forging coalitions across different identity categories, rather than speaking from within a single demographic. Meanwhile, we had sought out the Students for Liberty in hopes of expanding beyond the progressive focus of our cases. While SFL does offer an ideological alternative, we found that these libertarians do not identify in any simple way with any given political party, that many of them do not define their identities on a progressive-conservative axis, and that at least some regard themselves to be left-libertarians, a concept that does not arise in mainstream discussions of the movement. In sum, the categories that led to the selection of these cases were shown to be not fully adequate upon our prolonged examination of these groups.

Also, while these groups clearly (and intentionally) span a broad ideological, geographical, and community spectrum, they also share important similarities. Though they differ in the degrees to which they rely on formal structures, hierarchical leadership, and centralized messaging and the extent to which they are connected with institutional politics, they all place a strong emphasis on personal and collective storytelling. These stories often depend on grassroots media production and circulation, as well as on the deployment of content worlds, often drawn from popular culture. In each case, as well, young people actively influence the practices and rhetorics of these movements. They are helping to frame the agenda. They are helping to shape the media and the messages through which they are pursuing their causes. And they are making active decisions at every stage of the process. Our cases emphasize various dimensions of participatory culture and politics. These groups involve different populations, working toward distinctive causes, and deploying varied tactics. Yet as we have been conducting this research, we have consistently been struck by these groups’ ongoing attention to the cultural and social dimensions of participation, even as they work alongside political institutions and nonprofit organizations with more conventional approaches.

Our examples here are all U.S.-based, and we locate their activities within debates about American politics. However, these same tactics are being deployed by youth-centered movements all over the world, and we are eager to see other scholars explore what it means to do participatory politics in other cultural, political, and economic contexts. As we’ve selected these cases, we are aware of the much broader range of contemporary youth movements that are applying creative approaches to shifting the political debates around the environment, public health, poverty, antimilitarism, prison reform, campaign finance and media ownership reform, labor rights, gender and sexuality issues, racism, and countless other concerns. No book could cover the full scope of youth political participation, but we explore some key organizations working on these other issues as part of the digital archive (byanymedia.org) we have built as a resource for those reading and teaching this book.

Each of the five core chapters focuses on a specific case study while exploring key aspects of a broader theory of participatory politics. This includes notions of circulation and the paradoxes of participatory politics in relation to Invisible Children (Chapter 2); cultural activism, fannish civics, and content worlds in relation to the Harry Potter Alliance, Imagine Better, and Nerdfighters (Chapter 3); the tension between publicity and privacy, storytelling and surveillance among American Muslims (Chapter 4); the value of confessional storytelling and the risks of “coming out” online in the example of the DREAMers (Chapter 5); and the relationship between participatory and institutional politics, as well as the value of educational as opposed to electoral approaches, in the case of Students for Liberty (Chapter 6).

Each of the book’s authors has been an active contributor to the MAPP research, and, while the chapters are identified with individual authors, this book reflects multiple years of conversations among us. The designated writers for each chapter oversaw the field work for that case and also did the core of the writing, though each member of the team has had input into the other chapters. Because we want to emphasize the collaborative nature of our work, the collective term “we” is used throughout to refer to the research team as a whole.

Our Book Title

Tani Ikeda, the co-founder and executive director of ImMEDIAte Justice, was one of more than 20 young activists—representing different organizations or networks—who participated in a webinar on storytelling and digital civics we organized in January 2014. Ikeda’s organization uses media training for young women to promote “a world where individuals have the freedom to make their own choices about their bodies and sexualities.” The group’s first “About Us” page on its website places an emphasis on fostering youths’ voice: “Our mission is to encourage girls to imagine a just world by telling their untold stories of gender and sexuality through film. We believe young women can have a strong and positive impact on their communities if given the tools to amplify their voice” (ImMEDIAte Justice n.d.). The group sees making informed, conscious decisions about which media to use as central to such efforts.

During the webinar, Ikeda described the ways ImMEDIAte Justice encourages participants to inventory the symbolic resources at their disposal as they consider channels for sharing their messages:

So if you have a camera, use that to tell your story. If you don’t have that, if you’ve got a pen and a pad, write your story. If you don’t have that, you can literally speak your story.… It is something we always talk about because constantly, constantly, there’s a lack of resources in our communities, so it is really about figuring out how to tell our own stories by any means necessary.

Our team glanced at each other knowingly when Ikeda made this comment, since it echoed ideas we had already formulated through our ongoing conversations. We’ve found that the most highly motivated youth—those most eager to change the world—are taking advantage of any and every available media channel to tell their stories. This is what we mean by our book’s title, By Any Media Necessary, which plays on a phrase coined by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (in reference to struggling against class structures and economic inequalities) but made famous through a similar vow by Malcolm X (1964a): “That’s our motto. We want justice by any means necessary. We want freedom by any means necessary.” As he described the emergence of a new movement, Malcolm X specifically saw media as a key part of this effort, discussing in the same speech the development of a speakers bureau, a cultural organization, and a newspaper to get the word out, and perhaps, most interestingly, a space where “youth can play an active part.”

Then as now, the key word is “necessary.” Malcolm X was willing to accept violent protest only when and if it became necessary; contemporary protesters use whatever medium is most likely to produce their desired impact. As Ikeda suggests, these young activists lack access to the resources required to tell their stories through mass media and so they are looking for alternative means to communicate their most urgent messages. Certainly the most dramatic changes have occurred around digital and mobile media in terms of the speed and scope with which messages travel across a dispersed population. Such new media tools will get most of our focus here, yet these so-called new media have not so much displaced more established forms of political speech as supplemented them. Because they are responding to different issues, different communities, and different circumstances, our case study groups make different choices about what media to use. So we will see groups here using smart mobs, comics, posters, and even chocolate frogs to spread their messages. More than that, the same organization may deploy different media and tactics at different moments in its campaigns and may embrace having different community members delivering different narratives through whatever means are most readily available.

For us, the phrase “by any media necessary” captures five important aspects of contemporary civic culture, developed over the next five sections of this chapter. First, we look at how new hybrid systems of media-content circulation can bring unprecedented power to the voices of individuals and groups without access to mainstream forms of distribution. Second, we push back against recent accounts that have focused primarily on the political effects of singular platforms—Twitter or Facebook—in favor of a model that sees young activists as deploying any and all available media channels to share their messages (transmedia mobilization). Third, we make an argument for the importance of the civic imagination as a set of practices designed to inspire participants to change the world. Fourth, we trace the ways that the public’s expanded communication capacities are enabling a transfer of skills and practices from participatory culture toward participatory politics. And finally, we consider the ways that participating in these networks provides opportunities for informal, peer-to-peer civic education, a process that we link to larger considerations of connected learning.

Beyond Culture Jamming: The Politics of Circulation

Confronting a world dominated by broadcast media, owned by corporate monopolies and largely closed to grassroots messaging, Mark Dery (1993) urged activists to disrupt the flow, block the signal, and hijack the signs coming from Hollywood and Madison Avenue—an approach known as culture jamming. Dery projected that an alternative form of politics might emerge as networked communications became more widely accessible, one he hoped would be “interactive rather than passive, nomadic and atomized rather than resident and centralized, egalitarian rather than elitist.” As Jenkins, Ford, and Green (2013) note in Spreadable Media, the past few decades have seen dramatic increases in grassroots access to resources for cultural production and circulation and improvements to the infrastructure required for collective action. Spreadable Media draws a distinction between distribution (corporately controlled flows of media) and circulation (a hybrid system where content flows at least partially on the basis of decisions by individuals and groups, even as it is still responding to a context created through the agenda setting and content production of media industries). Today, rather than jam the signal, activist groups surf media flows. Rather than seeing themselves as saboteurs who seek to destroy the power of popular culture, they regard popular narratives as shared resources that facilitate their conversations (Jenkins forthcoming).

Let’s consider a powerful example of how the circulation of media content through social media can significantly amplify the voices of politically active youth. University of Oregon undergraduate Samantha Stendal was outraged by the media coverage around the 2013 Steubenville rape trial, which involved two Ohio high school football stars who were arrested, tried, and convicted of raping a 16-year-old girl after she got drunk at a party. The mainstream media, Stendal felt, paid more attention to how these accusations would adversely affect the high school athletes than to how the rape would impact the life of the young woman. She and some classmates produced a short (25-second) video entitled “A Needed Response,” which modeled how “real men” might react in a similar situation—showing care for a drunken female coed, rather than violating her. Stendal posted the video on YouTube as a contribution to the larger conversation: “The message I hope that people can get from this video is that we need to treat one another with respect. No matter what gender, we should be listening to each other and making sure there is consent” (“‘A Needed Response’” 2013). The video spread fast, reaching more than a million views within a few months and provoking editorial responses from mainstream news outlets. Ultimately, the purple-haired filmmaker and her collaborators received a Peabody Award, the first ever given for a YouTube video. The publicity around the Peabody Award, presented in May 2014, pushed its viewership even higher; as of April 2015, it had surpassed 10 million views. This is a spectacular success by any account, but success does not necessarily require such massive viewership or such national impact. By lowering transaction costs, digital processes of circulation make it possible for communication to occur at various levels; consider how many student-produced videos might reach 1,000 or 10,000 viewers, and compare that to the communication environment of a few decades ago. We might understand this award-winning video as simply one text—one communication act among many—that has led to a greater public focus on “rape culture” and the failure of administrative responses to rape on American college campuses in recent years.

Networked Practices

In many cases, media tactics move fluidly between online and offline spaces, and messages circulate in both tangible and virtual forms. “Yarn bombing” represents an emerging tactic for feminist interventions in public spaces, with knitters (most often women) taking over the streets through the spontaneous and unauthorized creation of yarn installations that might wrap around or cover over a public eyesore or otherwise seek to convert the ways we engage with our everyday surroundings (Close forthcoming). Yarn bombing is a material practice; while the specifics are new, it resembles graffiti, street theater, and a range of other ways that protest groups have occupied the streets. Yet yarn bombing is also a networked practice. Participants find each other online; they use social media to facilitate their planning or to share techniques with other collectives; and they capture and transmit photographs of their work.

And in many cases, social movement participants are also using networked communication practices to respond to content produced and distributed through broadcast media, again altering processes of circulation. In 2010, TLC (formerly The Learning Channel) launched a reality television series, All-American Muslim, which followed the daily lives of Muslim families in Dearborn, Michigan. In early December 2011, the Florida Family Association (FFA), a conservative group dedicated to defending “traditional American Biblical values,” argued that All-American Muslim dangerously “misrepresented” American Muslims by focusing on everyday suburban families. According to the FFA, this focus on the ordinariness of American Muslim lives would “lull” Americans into thinking that Islam posed no threat to the American “way of life.” The group was able to pressure Lowe’s (the home improvement store chain) and other sponsors to withdraw their advertisements. But then American Muslims engaged on social networking sites, using the hashtag #LOWEsboycott to fight back.

Kadir, an American Muslim digital media consultant, recalled how he helped organize the Lowe’s boycott on Facebook. His and others’ initial Facebook posts led to a series of conference calls to discuss next steps. More than 40 activists participated in one of those calls. They started a Google group for the “steering committee.” They put up a website. They created a petition on signon.org. Then they volunteered to organize protests in Virginia, New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and California. Their activities ranged from online petitions and circulated videos to a Hijabi Flashmob staged in a Lowe’s store in the Bay Area. Soon, prominent and established American Muslim advocacy organizations like the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) gave their support, and news outlets like CNN, the New York Times, and the Huffington Post reported the Lowe’s boycott story.

By December 14, the controversy reached The Daily Show, where host Jon Stewart voiced his dismay “that some group in Florida complain[ed] that the Muslims on All-American Muslim [were] too normal.” Speaking from a Lowe’s parking lot during that same comedy segment, “Senior Muslim Correspondent” Aasif Mandvi reported that he was “disappointed” because Lowe’s should be shut down completely: “If we are serious about fighting terror, we have to shut down their supply chain, i.e. Lowe’s, aka the one stop jihadi-superstore.” The company did not ultimately reverse its decision; All-American Muslim was canceled after one season due to low ratings. But the networked activists were able to galvanize popular awareness, as other Muslim and non-Muslim institutions, celebrities, and public figures voiced their support.

Stories That Matter

In Why Voice Matters, Nick Couldry (2010) defines voice as the capacity of people to “give an account of themselves and of their place in the world” in terms that are not only personally meaningful but can also be heard and acted on by others. Couldry makes clear that serious work on the politics of “voice” requires us to go beyond “a celebration of people speaking or telling stories,” but rather must be placed in a larger “political context,” one describing the forces that enable or block certain voices from being taken seriously as part of ongoing struggles over power (130). The borders of the political are fluid; different theorists may draw the line at various places. Throughout this book, though, we return many times to the issue of what makes certain practices political and what factors may constrain their potential impact.

Couldry ends his book with a call to reconsider what conditions need to be in place for voice to meaningfully enter public life; the rise of new media platforms has not guaranteed a political outcome, especially when those tools are controlled by corporations more interested in making money than expanding civic participation. Yet the availability of networked communications has given more people access to the means of expressing their voice, increased public and governmental awareness of the diversity of voices that are seeking to be heard, led to new consideration of what kinds of spaces and platforms are needed for effective political exchanges, and fostered what he calls “new intensities of listening” (140) as more participants feel an ethical need to try to process the emerging conversation. More and more, politics requires soliciting participation, getting people to tell their own stories, and also working together to amplify voices that might once have gone unheard. The Peabody Awards, referenced above, describe their mission as recognizing “stories that matter.” In a networked era, more of us have the capacity to produce and circulate stories that matter to us both personally and politically, but this does not insure that all of those stories are equally likely to be heard by those people who have the power and authority to act upon them.

While telling one’s personal story as a means of political consciousness-raising may have been a central aspect of earlier forms of identity politics, such storytelling takes on new significance when that story may be captured on video and circulated through online platforms and social network tools to reach many whom one might never encounter face to face. Many youth are deploying personal storytelling—through, for example, spoken word poetry—in order to link their stories to larger concerns within their communities, speaking for those who are not in a position to speak for themselves. In a MAPP-hosted webinar, spoken word poet Joshua Merchant described how he prepared emotionally to share his own story:

When I started to write about myself as far as my identity of being a queer black male of color from East Oakland, that was terrifying, and it’s something that’s still terrifying. I am also very aware that if I don’t [share my story], hell of a lot of people are still being muted, a heck of a lot of people from my community are not being heard.… You realize that you have a responsibility. Something that started off as just me needing to express myself because I didn’t have nobody to talk to, or I didn’t think anyone would listen to me, becomes “other people need to hear this because I know they’re from somewhere else than where I am from or from a similar place where this can change something for them.”

We will examine many other examples where looking straight into a camera and sharing one’s lived experience contributes to a larger political process—IC supporters sharing how they became concerned about genocide, DREAMers coming out as undocumented, or American Muslims challenging dominant images of what it means to be Muslim.

However, the confessional video—almost the emblematic example of Couldry’s idea of “giving an account of yourself” in the digital age—represents only one genre of political storytelling. Consider, for example, the case of Jonathan McIntosh, a 20-something political remix artist. McIntosh’s “Buffy vs. Edward” video depicts a confrontation between the pale, glittering young Twilight heartthrob and the empowered demon hunter from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. McIntosh created “Buffy vs. Edward” as an expression of his own frustration with the romanticization of “stalking” across the Twilight series. McIntosh uses Buffy to challenge Edward’s misogynistic and patriarchal attitudes, rebuffing his repeated advances and, ultimately, staking him. The video sparked discussion on Twilight fan forums around the series’ gender politics. Speaking at a Transmedia Hollywood event at UCLA in 2013, McIntosh explained:

I think what was most exciting about it for me was that it did create conversations about what was abusive behavior and what was romantic behavior … how the media [is] sort of framing these very problematic male behaviors as romantic. What was exciting about it is that it happened primarily on blogs devoted to Twilight .… For me, it was trying to create a dialogue about something that is quite serious—you know, stalking and abusive relationships through a lens of something people are already talking about.

A subsequent production, “Right Wing Radio Duck,” adopted a more overtly oppositional stance, though still expressed through playful appropriation of images. In it, McIntosh juxtaposed Glenn Beck’s anti-immigrant rants with vintage Donald Duck cartoons. McIntosh (2011) explains:

I felt that Donald Duck would make an ideal pop culture character with which to explore Beck’s messages and impact. Donald seemed an especially appropriate choice for this remix because he was originally created by Disney to represent a frustrated down-on-their-luck “anybody” character during the great depression. The current economic recession many Americans are struggling with today seem to parallel the struggles Donald faced in the old shorts from the 1930s and 1940s. I hoped that through Donald’s situation, viewers of this remix might understand why people are drawn to the Tea Party. They are often very legitimately frustrated and angry people looking for answers. And most of the time they are not getting any real answers from the corporate mass media or from either political party. In the remix Donald turns to Beck in desperation and is offered answers—crazy answers, but answers none-the-less.

This video drew national attention when “Right Wing Radio Duck” was denounced by Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and other Fox News commentators who refused to accept the idea that it was produced by a young media maker and circulated by grassroots networks, rather than being secretly funded and distributed by the Obama campaign.

There Are No Twitter Revolutions: Understanding Transmedia Mobilization

Malcolm Gladwell (2010) claims so-called Twitter revolutions build on weak social ties and do not motivate participants to put their lives on the line. Make no mistake—what we are describing here is not a Twitter revolution. Gladwell’s historical analysis rests on the unfair comparison between platforms (Twitter or Facebook) and social movements (whether the civil rights movements of the 1950s or today’s Arab Spring and Occupy movements). A fairer comparison might have been between today’s Twitter revolution and the telephone revolution of the 1960s, since we know that Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and other black leaders used the telephone as a key tool for coordinating activities among other black church leaders, freedom riders, and a range of other dispersed sets of supporters. Yet few readers would reduce the civil rights movement to the effects of long-distance phone calls. Rather, the telephone was one tool among many this movement deployed toward its aims. Aniko Bodgroghkozy (2013) documents the various strategies the civil rights movement’s leaders deployed to get their messages onto network television, often by staging protests in sites they felt would be most likely to provoke aggressive responses so that they could force racists to reveal their true faces to the public watching CBS, NBC, and ABC. And, of course, these civil rights leaders translated their cause into cultural references they felt would touch those who did not speak the languages of establishment politics—including even publishing comic books to translate nonviolent resistance into a youthful vernacular (Fellowship of Reconciliation 1955)—while using the communication infrastructure provided by the historically black press to address more focused messages to their supporters.

Similarly, today’s civil rights leaders—for example, the undocumented youth who have rallied in support of the DREAM Act—act across diverse media platforms as well as through face-to-face conversations and street protests. Like many previous generations of civil rights activists, they use conference calls to connect and coordinate among various groups, but they also use social media to coordinate action across a more dispersed network and circulate online video or internet memes to dramatize their political narratives for not just current but also potential supporters (Zimmerman 2012).3 Sometimes, they bypass broadcast media, other times, they seek mainstream coverage.

Whatever inequalities remain in terms of access to technologies, skills, and other social resources, we have found many instances where new media has provided tools and infrastructures by which marginal groups engage and participate in the public sphere. By claiming such space, subordinate groups can use networked media to expand the civic domain, even as elite groups seek to constrain the definition of what is “legitimate” in the public arena. For subordinate groups, these spaces of “everyday talk” are crucial for the development of political consciousness, for reinforcing shared cultural norms, and for working out alternatives to the dominant culture’s views of their identities and interests (Harris-Lacewell 2006 4).

Our focus on fostering change “by any media necessary” is informed by current discussions of transmedia activism and mobilization. Lina Srivastava (n.d.), who originated the concept, defines “transmedia activism” as “a framework that creates social impact by using storytelling by a number of authors who share assets and create content for distribution across multiple forms of media to influence social action.” The Transmedia Activism website argues that transmedia practices may deepen the public discussion over topics of shared concern: “Multiple entry points allow donors, activists, partners and audiences to have a comprehensive and coordinated experience of a complex issue, and co-creation allows increased engagement with an issue and greater movement toward action.”

Writing in regard to the immigrant rights movement in Los Angeles, Sasha Costanza-Chock (2010) notes important generational differences between older activists who seek to centralize the production and flow of messages and younger activists—including the DREAMers—who want to multiply and diversify both the messages and the channels through which they flow: “Transmedia mobilization thus marks a transition in the role of movement communication from content creation to aggregation, curation, remix and recirculation of rich media texts through networked movement formations” (114). Throughout the book, we will use Costanza-Chock’s term “transmedia mobilization” as more or less interchangeable with the concept of transmedia activism discussed above.

Transmedia mobilization expands what counts as participation. Because digital media practices can be participatory, transmedia mobilization requires co-creation and collaboration by different actors. Because it is open to participation by the social base of the movement, transmedia mobilization is the key strategic media form for an era of networked social movements. The theory of transmedia mobilization does not view media as apart from, but rather a part of social movement formation. Media, Costanza-Chock argues, is no longer solely serving the purpose of messaging; it also involves “strengthening movement identity formation and outcomes” (115).

Some forms of media production and participation are designed to help cement bonds within an emerging social movement, creating a context for shared identities or mythologies which, as we will discuss, enables participants to act collectively to achieve their shared social agenda. Drawing on ideas from Robert Putnam and Francis Fukuyama, Sabina Panth (2010) explains:

Bonding in social capital is referred to as social networks between homogenous groups. Bonding can be valuable for oppressed and marginalized members of the society to band together in groups and networks and support their collective needs.… The shared social norms and cooperative spirit from bonding also provide social safety nets to individuals and groups to protect themselves from external invasion.

So in the case of undocumented youth, media production helped to connect together a group of dispersed participants who had been forced to hide their common identities and experiences; we will discuss this in terms of the creation of “coming out” videos in Chapter 6. Other media production is designed to reach beyond the counterpublic to identify and educate potential supporters as part of an attempt to shape public opinion, a set of practices more closely associated with Putnam’s “bridging social capital.” As Panth continues, “Bridging allows different groups to share and exchange information, ideas and innovation and builds consensus among the groups representing diverse interests.”

Historically, social movement players might have chosen different strategies and communication channels to achieve bonding and bridging functions, but the current media environment is increasingly porous. Content produced for one audience and one purpose can easily be accessed in a networked environment by quite different groups, including those hostile to the original intent. danah boyd (2014) and Michael Wesch (2008) describe such occurrences as “context collapse.” Writing about video sharing in the age of YouTube, Wesch explains what happens when a video reaches unintended audiences: “The problem is not lack of context. It is context collapse: an infinite number of contexts collapsing upon one another into that single moment of recording. The images, actions, and words captured by the lens at any moment can be transported to anywhere on the planet and preserved (the performer must assume) for all time.”

As a consequence of context collapse, language crafted in order to speak to the shared assumptions and norms inside a group are made public to those outside the critical counterpublic, both potential supporters and potential haters. All of the groups we’ve studied grapple with this reality, that an expanded communication capacity can also result in expanding conditions of exposure and vulnerability. Context collapse recurs across the book, but especially in relation to Kony 2012 in Chapter 2 and the play between publicity and privacy as experienced by American Muslim youth in Chapter 4.

Many groups are now experimenting with what alternative media strategies that empower their supporters to take a more active role in shaping communication flows might look like. Transmedia mobilization is unstable and fluid, shifting tactically in response to changing conditions on the ground. It is highly responsive to the uneven access that participants have to different media platforms, tools, and channels.

The groups we discuss are differentially situated in terms of their embrace of different media tactics and strategies and of their openness to bottom-up participation in shaping their messages and their circulation. Invisible Children, for example, has a fairly rigidly structured organization; authorized leaders make many key decisions that define IC’s vision and its core tactics. IC actively recruits new members into local chapters that maintain some autonomy from the parent organization. IC actively trains youth leadership to support their activities through summer camps, internships, and local events. And many of these local chapters are affiliated with schools and universities, on the one hand, or churches, on the other (Brough 2012). IC’s media production remains tightly controlled, though there has sometimes been a limited interest in encouraging DIY video-making practices. IC represents transmedia mobilization with a limited model of youth participation but with stronger emphasis on the cultural and social dimensions of politics than a traditional nonprofit might have. IC’s Kony 2012 video circulated via the dispersed network of supporters it had built up over almost ten years of organizing on the ground.

IC also demonstrates some of the challenges of maintaining a networked organization. As the organization received pushback from other human rights groups, it faced a leadership crisis. IC spokesperson Jason Russell had a highly publicized breakdown and the other national leaders—his longtime friends—circled the wagons. A new generation of leaders stepped up behind the scenes and shaped IC’s response, but it took them a few days to regroup. This delayed response left the more loosely affiliated network members exposed. IC was too centralized and not sufficiently participatory, and knowledge was not adequately dispersed across the network. Ironically—as we discuss in Chapter 2—in the wake of Kony 2012, the organization became more centralized to maximize control over its messaging rather than maximize participation.

Compare IC with the DREAMer movement (see Chapter 5). The traditional U.S. immigrant rights movement has had elements of both grassroots and institutional mobilization, but it has largely been tied to institutions like labor unions, the Democratic Party, and a range of nonprofit organizations. The traditional movement tends to break down according to ethnic or national boundaries, to be geographically localized, to maintain tight control over its messaging, and to rely on the ethnic media—radio personalities in the case of the Spanish-language communities in Los Angeles (Costanza-Chock 2010). The DREAMer movement marks a shift away from many of these formalized structures. Youth are connecting across nationality and across geographic location through their capacity to mobilize via social media. DREAMers have a dispersed capacity for media production: any participant can—in theory—create and share videos, and, as a consequence, there is much less control over messaging. These less hierarchical structures allow the DREAMer network enormous flexibility to respond to changing conditions (Zimmerman 2012), especially when the struggle shifted from passing a proposed federal law to supporting a series of local and state initiatives. The DREAMers’ network could spread knowledge from any point to any other point. Leaders emerged organically, and there was not a fixed or hierarchical structure that might overrule local innovation. Critics, on the other hand, of such networked organizations often stress the fragmentation or incoherence of their messaging, suggesting that such tactics make it hard for institutional players to identify and respond to their collective concerns. At the same time, the DREAMers still benefited from training and support from more formal organizations.

Dreaming Alternative Tomorrows: The Civic Imagination

Speaking at the 2008 Harvard graduation, J. K. Rowling told a generation of young students who had come of age reading her books, “We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.” Neither a generic celebration of the human creative capacity nor a simple defense of bedtime stories, Rowling’s talk described how her earlier experiences working with Amnesty International shaped the Harry Potter books. Linking imagination to empathy, she called out those who refuse to expand their vision: “They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know” (Rowling 2008). As Chapter 3 discusses, Rowling’s “Imagine Better” concept inspired the Harry Potter Alliance’s efforts to forge common cause with various other fandoms.

Rowling’s call to “imagine better” could describe a range of movements that are embracing “a politics that understands desire and speaks to the irrational; a politics that employs symbols and associations; a politics that tells good stories” (Duncombe 2007, 9). Liesbet van Zoonen (2005) has similarly questioned the divide between the affective commitments of fans and the cognitive processes associated with active citizenship: “Pleasure, fantasy, love, immersion, play, or impersonations are not concepts easily reconciled with civic virtues such as knowledge, rationality, detachment, learnedness, or leadership” (63). As a consequence, there has historically been a tendency to devalue the role of imagination within the sphere of politics.

As we’ve pursued this work, we’ve increasingly been drawn toward the concept of the “civic imagination,” which we define as the capacity to imagine alternatives to current social, political, or economic institutions or problems. Put bluntly, one cannot change the world unless one can imagine what a better world might look like. Too often, our focus on contemporary problems makes it impossible to see beyond immediate constraints and develop a clearer sense of what might be achieved. One also can’t change the world until one can imagine oneself as an active political agent. For many of the young people we spoke with, the message they received on a daily basis was that what they had to say didn’t matter. These social change organizations work hard to help them learn to trust their own voice. And for some of these young activists—especially those who come from privileged backgrounds—the development of the ability to imagine and feel empathy for others who are living under different conditions is a key stage in their political awakening.

There is no doubt a utopian dimension of this civic imagination—some of what these youth imagine is impossible to achieve. But, as with other utopian models of the past, there is a value in articulating one’s goals and ideals, using them as a yardstick against which to measure current conditions and identifying factors that might block the realization of those “dreams.” Of course, not everyone’s dreams come true, and there is a negative flipside to the civic imagination, which has to do with disappointment, frustration, disillusionment, and rage that may also spark political protest. Here, too, critical discourses—even at their most dystopian moments—often depend on an implicit set of ideals about how power should be distributed. Writing about the “Hands up! Don’t Shoot!” gesture, Kedhar (2014) describes the ways that such street theater or as she prefers, street dancing “can transform a space of control, in which their movements are restricted, into a space of freedom, in which their movements are defiant, bold, and empowered, a space in which they have the ability to move freely.”

We are not unique in emphasizing the place of imagination in fomenting social and political change. The term “political imagination” often refers to the ways individuals perceive and understand the political world (Adelson 1971). “Imagination” is used here in the sense of forming a mental image of something that is abstract. But such theories of the “political imagination” may have overlooked the potential role of “imagination” in its additional sense: contemplating things that are not real, or forming a picture in your mind of something you have not seen or experienced. For youth, this focus on potential civic roles is important since, as writers like Shakuntala Banaji and David Buckingham (2013) suggest, young people are often excluded from playing an “actual” or “meaningful” role in the processes associated with institutionalized politics. Their agendas are marginalized, and often, as with the current voter suppression efforts that make it harder for American youth to register to vote through their schools, they are disenfranchised. Yet our cases show that young people are learning to identify and frame political issues in language that speaks to themselves and their peers.

The Institute for the Future reached a similar conclusion about the value of imaginative citizenship when participants at the inaugural ReConstitutional Convention, held in 2013, penned a manifesto for what they call the “public imagination”:

Any democracy requires a thriving public imagination, in order to make visible, sharable, and understandable to all the people new ideas, new models, new potential policies. We cannot make any kind of collective decision unless the collective can understand what is at stake, and envision where it may lead.… We must strive to understand the private imaginations of others, whose reality is defined by different lived experiences, and assumptions. (“Framework: Public Imagination” 2013)

Their document describes a movement from private imagination toward its realization in forms that can be shared with a wider public. That process often depends on images already familiar to participants from other contexts—images drawn not from political rhetoric but popular fantasy. Many of the youth we interviewed feel ownership over these popular myths but struggle to make connection with symbols associated with traditional civic life.

Civic Agency and Ethical Spectacles

Andrew Slack, the young community organizer who has been a key leader of the Harry Potter Alliance, explained the price of falling back on alienating and stagnant rhetoric as a means of teaching the emerging generation about democratic values: “It affects how people feel regarding their civic agency, civic engagement, and civic education—all of these falter and contribute to a systemic empathy deficit that has a destructive effect on every aspect of the democratic process including our collective ability to get beyond political blind spots through imagining new possibilities to effectively respond to our most stubborn problems around inequality, environmental crisis, etc.” (personal correspondence, 2014).

For Slack and other fan activists, the solution comes through mobilizing popular stories as an entry point for political conversations, which brings us back to the zombies at the Occupy Wall Street encampment, the ways Jonathan McIntosh allowed Donald Duck to take down anti-immigration rhetoric, and the use of Harry Potter references to explain the stakes in human rights struggles. Chapter 3 discusses such practices in terms of fannish civics, in which they depend on a deep understanding and emotional commitment to a content world, and cultural acupuncture, in which these remixes tap into broadly shared knowledge about current popular culture trends that might be accessible to a larger audience.

As we have presented our research, some skeptics have expressed concern that “empowerment fantasies” may be displacing empathy for real-world problems; others have suggested that for these young fans—who often come from privileged backgrounds—it is easier to access human rights concerns through allusions to popular culture than through traditional mechanisms of consciousness raising and identity politics. Yet such mechanisms play vital functions even in those groups where people are directly advocating for their own rights and dignity. For instance, to explain his undocumented experiences, in a post on his blog, Erick Huerta—an immigrant rights advocate —explained how he turned to Superman, who was “from another planet … and grew up in the United States, just like me.” Superman, a character created in the 1930s by two Jewish high school students—both second-generation immigrants from Eastern Europe—has become a key vehicle by which another wave of immigrants has sought to understand their place in American society (Engle 1987; Andrae 1987). If ever there was an illegal alien, it is Kal-El from the planet Krypton, whose parents sent him from his native world in search of a new life and who slipped across the border (via spaceship) in the middle of the night, got adopted by an Anglo family, has had to hide his true identity and remain silent about how he got here, and yet has been deeply dedicated to promoting and defending American values.

Retelling Superman’s narrative in this way offers an empowering fantasy for other undocumented youth. Across her research on the DREAMer movement, Arely M. Zimmerman found several examples of the deployment of superhero imagery. One respondent described the experience of discovering other undocumented youth online as like “finding other X-Men.” Another compared their campaign, which involved youth from many different backgrounds, to the Justice League. A third suggested that posting a video on YouTube in which he proclaimed himself “proud” and “undocumented” had parallels to the experience of Spider-Man, who removed his mask on national television during Marvel’s Civil Wars storyline. A graphic created for an online recruitment campaign used the image of Wolverine to suggest what kind of hero youth volunteers might aspire to become. These images also provided a means by which the debates about immigration rights might be discussed from new perspectives, reaching many who had never considered their experiences in this way before. Subsequently, the shared use of the superhero mythology allowed Imagine Better to partner with immigrant rights groups for a campaign that accompanied the release of Man of Steel, discussed in more detail in Chapter 3.

Dreamers use Superman to explain the immigration experience.

It is not surprising that Huerta uses superhero comics as a means to explain his lived experiences of being undocumented. His Superman saga exists alongside a range of other efforts to mobilize the superhero as a kind of technology for sparking the civic imagination, including uses of Wonder Woman for feminist politics (Yockey 2012) and Captain America as a symbol for both reactionary and progressive organizations (F. Phillips 2013).

As Stephen Duncombe (2012a), one of the authors of the manifesto for the public imagination, explains:

Scratch an activist and you’re apt to find a fan. It’s no mystery why: fandom provides a space to explore fabricated worlds that operate according to different norms, laws, and structures than those we experience in our “real” lives. Fandom also necessitates relationships with others: fellow fans with whom to share interests, develop networks and institutions, and create a common culture. This ability to imagine alternatives and build community, not coincidentally, is a basic prerequisite for political activism.

Our concept of the civic imagination is closely related to the set of practices Duncombe (2007) has identified as “ethical spectacle.” Duncombe documents tactics that command public attention, often by dramatizing the stakes of a political struggle, and often in a language that is playful, even comic, rather than sober and literal-minded. These ethical spectacles work best, he tells us, when they emerge from participants’ collective imaginations, when they are flexible enough to adapt to changing situations, when they are transparent enough that spectators understand them as constructed, and when they have utopian dimensions—because they allow us to think beyond the range of current possibilities.

So far, our discussion of the civic imagination has identified examples that deploy fantastical elements from popular culture to make their political points. Such examples are often the most surprising, since they look so different from the forms of political speech we associate with earlier generations. But the civic imagination is also at play as young people share their own real-world experiences, as in, for example, Joshua Merchant’s spoken-word pieces. Consider another example. On December 11, 2012, Noor Tagouri, a 19-year-old American Muslim woman, posted a video, “My Dream: First American Hijabi Anchorwoman #LetNoorShine,” on YouTube. In it, she recalled how a photo of her sitting behind an ABC news desk took on a life of its own on Facebook and garnered 20,000 likes in one week. Noor then asked various media celebrities—including Oprah Winfrey, Lisa Ling, and Anderson Cooper—to let her shadow or intern with them to help fulfill her dream of becoming the first hijabi (scarf-wearing) news anchor on an American primetime news network: “It is the people from every corner of the globe who have liked and shared my photo and sent me thousands of letters and messages of their support, who gave me the confidence to ask … [for] this.” The video was both an expression of Noor’s dreams and an encouragement to imagine a different status for Muslims in American media.

Photo from Noor Tagouri’s campaign to become a hijab-wearing anchor on commercial television.

Writing about a 1957 news photograph showing white citizens jeering at black students as they attempted to enter a once segregated school, Danielle Allen (2006) tells us:

The photo forced a choice on its U.S. viewers, and its power to engage the imagination lay in this. The picture simultaneously recorded a nightmarish version of a town meeting and, by presenting to a broad public the visible structure of segregation, elicited throughout the citizenry an epiphantic awareness of the inner workings of public life and made those mechanics the subject of debate. (5)

Noor’s video does similar work, enabling us to envision, discuss, debate, and struggle to achieve other possibilities. Allen argues, “As democracy develops an explanation of how its citizenry is a coherent body, ‘the people,’ and makes this body imaginable, it also invents customs and practices of citizenly interaction that accord with that explanation” (17). In short, changing how the American public imagines democracy may be a key first step toward altering how Americans perceive and treat each other, essential if undocumented or American Muslim youth are going to be embraced within “we the people.” The photograph of Noor in her hijab sitting in a network anchor’s chair called attention to the absence of American Muslims within the mainstream media, while also promoting the young woman’s aspiration to someday enter the media on a more equal basis. The photograph Allen discusses became part of the shared political culture through its circulation via mass media; other young activists have similarly used social networking platforms to heighten the visibility of their own creative works.

Imagining Communities

Benedict Anderson (1983) used the term “imagined community” to describe one of the core mechanisms shaping strong nationalist movements in the 19th and 20th centuries; people across the British empire read the Times of London, and through this shared experience and through the ways that the newspaper articulated a common agenda, they were able to connect diverse everyday experiences to a larger project of empire building. Today, the term “imagining communities” might be more productive. Young people are not simply accepting an agenda constructed by mass media for their consumption, rather they are actively co-constructing the contents of the civic imagination through networked communications. They are building a group identity that might fuel their campaigns and, within those campaigns, they are developing ways of expressing their shared visions for what a better society might look like. Such exchanges may occur at all levels—from the hyperlocal to the transnational, from friendship circles to social movements and formal organizations—yet imagining is an activity, something produced and not simply consumed.

In Anderson’s classic formulation, these communities were imagined because they consisted of massive numbers of people who would never meet each other face to face but somehow felt connected to each other; the same would be true for today’s imagining communities, except that in the context of a many-to-many networked communications system, the potential for direct contact between participants is different from what could have been achieved among the readers of the Times. Ethan Zuckerman (2013c) has noted the many ways that contemporary participants in the online world fail to realize its more cosmopolitan potentials, and fail to reach out to people from different backgrounds than their own, yet there is still a greater opportunity for such interactions than could be facilitated through print culture.

We are speaking here of the civic imagination rather than the public imagination or the political imagination for several reasons. The public imagination emphasizes the social structure—envisioned as a public or counterpublic—from which these acts of imagining arise, while we see these young people involved in something more fluid, a good deal less rationalized than the way the public sphere has traditionally been conceived. Peter Dahlgren (2009) tells us:

The civic resonates with the notion of public, in the sense of being visible, relevant for, and in some ways accessible to many people that is, situated outside the private, intimate domain. “Civic” carries the implication of engagement in public life—a cornerstone of democracy. Interestingly, the civic also signifies the public good. It conveys a sense of the altruistic, a kind of “service,” doing good for others, such as volunteer work.… The civic is thus a precondition for the political, in the sense that it situates us within the realm of the public. (58)

We are describing as “civic” those practices that are designed to improve the quality of life and strengthen social ties within a community, whether defined in geographically local or dispersed terms. Some of these acts of imagining are closely linked to various forms of institutional politics, seeking to advocate changes that can be achieved only through governmental action.

Adorable Care Act meme.

For example, the Adorable Care Act was an effort to educate the public about the national healthcare policy often called “Obamacare” through the creation of memes that linked policy concerns with images of cute animals, designed to be circulated through social media platforms. In other cases (as we’ve already suggested) activist groups have sought change through different means—for example, fighting back over terms of service on Web 2.0 platforms that restrict their expressive freedom or promoting change through education (as will be discussed in relation to the “second-wave” libertarians).

Christina Evans (2015), another member of the YPP network team, has been using the term “digital civic imagination” in a somewhat different but closely related sense—to refer to the ways that young people are (or are not) able to reconceptualize the social media practices they use in their everyday lives into tactics they might deploy as citizens. Through interviews with young people in Oakland, Chicago, and rural North Carolina, Evans found that young people often need help to translate skills they acquired in their social and recreational use of media toward political ends, and she considers what roles educators might play in that process. Our work can be understood as helping to map the trajectory from participatory culture to participatory politics.

Making the Leap: From Participatory Culture to Participatory Politics

Our book’s focus is not on new technologies per se, but on the possibilities (real and imagined) that we might use these tools to achieve greater political participation. Many initially acquired the skills and accessed infrastructures supporting this activism through cultural, rather than overtly political, activities that have become more widespread in the everyday experiences of American youth. To be clear, the cultural is always already (at least implicitly) political, but our focus here is on the ways that cultural practices are being deployed toward explicitly political ends. We are not walking away from decade-long debates about whether appropriation and remix practices may have political effects in terms of allowing us to reimagine gender and sexual identities in the case of slash fan fiction, allowing us a momentary escape from the control of regulatory structures (as in for example, discussions of Beatlemania in Ehrenreich et al. 1997), or inspiring struggles over intellectual property law constraints on political speech (as in the case of the Organization for Transformative Works.) Yet there have always been those who argued that such practices did not constitute “real politics,” which—in their eyes—involved mobilization, voting, petitioning, protest, and labor organizing. This book is thus taking up the challenge of mapping some of the points of contact between cultural and institutional models of politics and we are starting by charting the interplay between participatory culture and participatory politics.

Participatory culture describes a diverse set of shared activities and social engagements, ranging from fan fiction writing and crafting to gaming, through which people collectively carve out a space for expression and learning. Describing the educational dimensions of participatory culture, Henry Jenkins et al. (2006) stress that groups involved in such activities are characterized by “relatively low” barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong social support for creating and sharing and for the development of “voice,” informal practices providing mentorship and training for would-be participants, and contributors’ sense that what they share matters. Young men and women who learned how to use their cameras recording skateboarding stunts, to mash up images to make cute cat pictures, or to edit fan videos are now turning their skills toward political speech and grassroots mobilization. These “creative activists” often speak to each other through images borrowed from commercial entertainment but remixed to communicate their own messages; they are often deploying social media platforms, sometimes in ways that challenge corporate interests; and they are forging communities through acts of media circulation.

By Any Media Necessary responds to recent analyses by writers such as Nico Carpentier (2011), Peter Dahlgren (2011), Christopher M. Kelty (2013), and Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Henderson (2013), who have called for more precise distinctions between different models of participation. Delwiche (2013), for example, draws strong links between the kinds of participatory democracy advocated by the counterculture of the 1960s and the forms of participatory culture that emerged in reaction to networked computing. Today’s participatory culture and politics reflects decades of struggles to gain greater control of the means of cultural production and circulation, to free the communication environment from powerful gatekeepers. Yet a range of interests have attached themselves to a rhetoric of participation, which may mask the continuation of old inequalities in how wealth and power are distributed. Kelty writes:

“Participating” in Facebook is not the same thing as participating in a Free Software project, to say nothing of participating in the democratic governance of a state. If there are indeed different “participatory cultures” then the work of explaining their differences must be done by thinking concretely about the practices, tools, ideologies, and technologies that make them up. Participation is about power, and, no matter how “open” a platform is, participation will reach a limit circumscribing power and its distribution. (29)

As we seek to deepen our understanding of participatory politics, we need to be more precise in describing the forms participation takes. Critics of participatory politics often see participation as simply another term for co-optation, implying that participating in a neoliberal economy only empowers corporate forces controlling the pipelines through which these new messages flow (Dean 2005). Rather, we describe participation in terms of the ability to forge a sense of collective voice and efficacy through larger networks that work together to bring about change.

A More Participatory Culture

Participation, as Nico Carpentier (Jenkins and Carpentier 2013) suggests, is a utopian ideal: “There is no end point. It will never be achieved … There will always be struggle, there will always be contestation. There will always be elitist forces trying to make things go back to the old ways” (266). Drawing from Carpentier, we see participation as an aspiration as much as it is a reality, something groups such as those we survey are striving to achieve. Carpentier (2011) makes a productive distinction between what he calls minimalist models of participation where participation is limited in scope and what he calls maximalist models that see participation as playing “a more substantial and continuous role and does not remain restricted to the ‘mere’ election of representatives” (16–17). Here, participation is understood as a matter of degree—few situations match his ideal of maximalist participation.

While Jenkins’s original white paper (Jenkins et al. 2006) used the term “participatory culture,” we will refer to “a more participatory culture” to call attention to those who have not yet acquired the skills and access and who lack the power and status needed to meaningfully participate. A more participatory culture is one where more people have access to the means of cultural production and circulation and one where more key decisions are made with the active and expanded participation of community members. A more participatory culture is not an inevitable outgrowth of technological change; to achieve it will require struggles to broaden access to technological infrastructures and participatory skills, struggles against the corporate ownership and government regulation of communication channels, struggles to retain our collective rights to privacy and to free expression, struggles to be heard and respected by institutional power brokers, and struggles against various forms of segregation and marginalization.

Our research is helping to identify many ways that activist networks have “empowered” young people, especially those who are already culturally engaged, to embrace more active roles as citizens. Many youth are finding their civic voices through projects that encourage them to produce and circulate media. While we see much to celebrate here, we are also concerned about the precariousness of some of these publics, which contend with the same pressures that have disempowered other young people in the past. In a review of the existing literature, Jennifer S. Light (2015) concludes:

Time and again, it seems, when the cost has fallen young people have turned to new media as tools for political expression among themselves and to the broader community of adults. Yet, in keeping with the history of alternative media more generally—for adults, too, have been enthusiastic users—the youth who used media technologies but did not control media systems found traditional gatekeeping authorities—all adults—eager to assert control over and restrict technologies’ future use. (33)

Throughout the book, we consider a range of factors that limit the capacity for participatory politics, including issues of media literacy and civic skills (in the case of Kony 2012), digital access (in the case of the DREAMers), surveillance (in the case of American Muslims), and institutional entanglements (in the case of Students for Liberty). Perhaps most powerfully, we address the range of institutional constraints and ideological blinders—the larger power dynamics around race, gender, sexuality, legal status, or generation that make it hard for young people to meaningfully participate in the political process.

What Does Participatory Politics Look Like?

In a white paper for the MacArthur Youth and Participatory Politics Research Network, Cathy J. Cohen and Joseph Kahne (2012) define participatory politics as “interactive, peer-based acts through which individuals and groups seek to exert both voice and influence on issues of public concern” (vi). This report identified various forms of participatory politics, including the sharing of information through social media, engaging in online conversations through digital forums or blogs and podcasts, creating original content in the form of online videos or photoshopped memes to comment on a current issue, using Twitter and other microblogging tools to rally a community toward collective action, or deploying databases in order to investigate an ongoing concern. Participatory politics represent forms of political participation that are embedded in the everyday life practices of young political agents. Cohen and Kahne explain:

The participatory skills, norms, and networks that develop when social media is used to socialize with friends or to engage with those who share one’s interests can and are being transferred to the political realm.… What makes participatory culture unique is not the existence of these individual acts, but that the shift in the relative prevalence of circulation, collaboration, creation, and connection is changing the cultural context in which people operate. (3)

Joe Kahne, Ellen Middaugh, and Danielle Allen (2014) stress that their “notion of the political extends beyond the electoral focus” to include a “broad array of efforts” that range from “electoral” activities to “lifestyle politics” (1). More specifically, they propose the following activity types as characteristic of participatory politics:

Circulation. In participatory politics, the flow of information is shaped by many in the broader community rather than by a small group of elites.…

Dialogue and feedback. There is a high degree of dialogue among community members, as well as a practice of weighing in on issues of public concern and on the decisions of civic and political leaders.…

Production. Members not only circulate information but also create original content (such as a blog or video that has political intent or impact) that allows them to advance their perspectives.…

Mobilization. Members of a community rally others to help accomplish civic or political goals.…

Investigation. Members of a community actively pursue information about issues of public concern.… (41)

Cohen and Kahne have overseen two national surveys, each collecting data from roughly 3,000 survey respondents aged 15–25. The bad news is that despite the publicity around Obama’s courting of the youth vote, more than half (56 percent) of those contacted had not been involved in politics in any form over the 12 months prior to being queried. Somewhat more reassuring was that what they are calling participatory politics does not “distract” youth from forms of institutional political practices (such as voting, petitioning, street protest, or writing letters to the editor). On the contrary, Cohen and Kahne found that those who engaged in participatory politics (roughly 40–45 percent across all racial categories) were almost twice as likely to vote as those who did not.

Seeking to better understand how these various sets of practices entered the lives of American youth, the Good Participation team at Harvard University (Rundle, James, and Weinstein forthcoming), conducted in-depth interviews with 70 civically and politically active youth between the ages of 15 and 25. The youth they interviewed were more likely to engage, on a regular basis, with some of these practices (especially circulation, production, and investigation) than others (dialogue, feedback, and mobilization), while there was a wide range in the depth and degree of sophistication with which they were applying these practices.

Ben Bowyer, a member of the YPP survey team, also analyzed data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project that was collected following the 2008 and 2012 elections (Smith 2013). He found substantial increases in these participatory practices over this four-year period. For example, the number of youth posting pictures or videos related to social and political concerns increased from 10 percent to 21 percent; the number sharing political news through social media went from 13 percent to 32 percent; and the percentage who had started a group online supporting a cause went from 14 to 26 percent. By almost every measure, the percentage of youth engaged in participatory politics is growing at a rapid rate. Keep in mind that these practices often involved deeper commitments of time, energy, social capital, and other resources than many of the mechanisms of institutional politics (voting, for example), supporting our argument that at least some young people are not “disengaged” but rather are conducting politics through other means.

Reflecting what we’ve described as the participation gap, these skills and experiences are unevenly distributed among American youth. The good news is that these sets of participatory politics practices may be more broadly accessible across race than those practices associated with institutionalized politics. Cohen and Kahne found that 43 percent of white, 41 percent of black, 38 percent of Latino, and 36 percent of Asian-American youth participated in at least one act of participatory politics during the prior 12 months. By contrast, the difference in voting in 2008 between the group with the highest rate of turnout according to the U.S. Census Bureau—African American youth (52 percent)—and the group with the lowest rate of turnout—Latino youth (27 percent)—is 25 percentage points. These findings offer hope for forms of political participation that more fully reflect the demographic diversity of contemporary American society. However, there is still heavy stratification on the basis of educational background and some of the more “advanced” practices are much more likely to be performed by those with high educational, economic, cultural, and social capital than by those who are more disadvantaged. So while participatory politics does raise hope for fostering a more democratic culture, it can not in and of itself overcome some of the structural inequalities that have historically blocked many from participating in civic and political life.

In a critique of the concept of participatory politics, James Hay (2011) writes, “It would be too simplistic to generalize blogging, photo-shopping and social networking (media revolution) as the condition for an enhanced democracy” (666). Hay cites the Tea Party as an example of a more participatory—yet reactionary—approach to politics, a debatable proposition given how much this right-wing group relies on traditional hierarchies, established media channels, funding from conservative think tanks, and established political framing practices, and how little room it has for youth participation. But Hay is correct in stressing that participatory politics may be just as likely to generate reactionary as progressive politics, and we have debated where Invisible Children and second-wave libertarianism fall on this spectrum. As we will see in Chapter 6, the young libertarians have sought to negotiate for themselves a space between party politics and more participatory forms of engagement. These new platforms and practices potentially enable forms of collective action that are difficult to launch and sustain under a broadcast model, yet these platforms and practices do not guarantee any particular outcome, do not necessarily inculcate democratic values or develop shared ethical norms, do not necessarily respect and value diversity, do not necessarily provide key educational resources, and do not ensure that anyone will listen when groups speak out about injustices they encounter.

Forging New Links: Civic Paths and Connected Learning

A key challenge is to identify the mechanisms that help young people move from being socially and culturally active to being politically and civically engaged. Linda Herrera (2012), for example, interviewed young Egyptian activists to map the trajectory of their involvement with digital media prior to becoming revolutionaries. For many, their point of entry was through recreational use—downloading popular music—trading Hollywood movies, gaming, or sharing ideas through online discussion forums and social networking sites. Mundane involvements in participatory culture exposed them to a much broader range of ideas and experiences than allowed within the official culture of this Islamic nation, encouraged them to acquire digital skills and discover their personal voice, and enabled them to forge collective identities and articulate their hopes for the future. As Herrera concludes, “Their exposure to, and interaction with, ideas, people, images, virtual spaces, and cultural products outside their everyday environments led to a substantial change in their mentality and worldview” (343). Such practices involved transgression against government and religious authorities who sought to restrict their engagement in popular culture; such shared experiences led them to understand themselves as a generation that has developed distinctive cultural and political identities through their engagement with each other via an ever evolving array of digital platforms. We have seen similar patterns throughout our interviews with American youth who have become involved in these various activist movements.

Many “traditional” civic organizations enable youth to participate based on an apprenticeship model, where they learn through subordinating themselves to a powerful adult mentor. By contrast, our case study groups adopt a more participatory model, in which young people are taking control of and shaping their own modes of engagement. In this model, learning takes place not only vertically, from expert to newcomer, but also horizontally, from peer to peer. Such sites often blur the distinction between interest-based and friendship-based networks that have informed other work in the connected learning tradition described below. Young people may enter a given network based on shared interests and with the intention of working toward collective goals; in the process, they become integrated into rich social communities that often motivate and reward their continued participation. Some of this mentorship is built into the group’s formal activities, while other forms emerge organically as participants learn through practice (Kligler-Vilenchik and Shresthova 2012).

Current scholarship (Gibson 2003; Bennett 2008b; Wattenberg 2008; Buckingham 2000; P. Levine 2007) suggests that young people are rarely addressed as political agents, that they are not invited into the political process, and that they are not consulted in the political decision-making process, whether local, state, national, or global. According to these studies, young people are most apt to become politically involved if they come from families with a history of citizen participation and political activism, if they encounter civics teachers who encourage them to reflect on and respond to current events, if they attend schools where they are allowed a voice in core decisions, and if they participate in extracurricular activities and volunteerism that gives back to their community. Most forms of activism reach the same core group of participants, who already are politically engaged, and redirect them toward new issues. But the Harry Potter Alliance and the Nerdfighters, for example, often target young people who are engaged culturally, who may already be producing and sharing fan art, and help them to extend their engagement into politics, often by deploying existing skills and capacities in new ways. Kahne, Lee, and Feezell (2011) discovered that involvement in online networks organized around shared interests (fandom, for example) also shapes political identities: “online, nonpolitical, interest-driven activities serve as a gateway to participation in important aspects of civic and, at times, political life, including volunteering, engagement in community problem-solving, protest activities, and political voice” (2).

The Carnegie Corporation’s report on the Civic Mission of Schools (Gibson 2003) argues that educational institutions play a crucial role in allowing students to rehearse civic skills by participating in decision-making processes directly impacting their lives, yet many schools are backing away from this historic mission because they fear controversy with parents or loss of control over school governance in what is seen as a risky time for American education. Lauren Bird, the 20-something-year-old communications director for the Harry Potter Alliance, represents the kind of youth who might have fallen through the cracks under these conditions. Across a series of interviews, Bird shared a personal story about how schools fail to engage students with the political process:

I wasn’t terribly civically engaged when I was younger. I had some teachers who told us of the importance of watching the news and being responsible citizens and I followed that advice as best I could, but the contents of the news or just what being a “responsible citizen” meant, was rarely discussed. I grew up in a suburb in Texas during the War on Terrorism. You can guess the kind of ideologies most of my educators held. As I started realizing that I didn’t agree with most of the things the culture around me preached, I quickly learned to stay silent and pretend I did.… I wish I had had more grown up examples of diverse and critical thinking. I wish there had been more teachers who were talking about current events or about how to get involved in our communities.… That would’ve gotten my feet wet to want to be more proactive and involved.

We first interviewed Bird as a comparative literature student at New York University, who had just starting to become more actively involved as a video blogger for the Harry Potter Alliance. Bird recounted having been invested in the Harry Potter books since the age of eight and doing video projects since high school. Bird was drawn into the social media around fandom and participated online but never “IRL” (in real life). In high school, an encounter with the videos created by John and Hank Green led to a discovery of the Nerdfighter community. But Bird developed interest in the civic aspect when the Harry Potter Alliance was involved in Help Haiti Heal (a campaign that raised enough money to fund five cargo planes full of disaster relief supplies) in 2010—and was amazed by the ways fans used their power to help. A few months later, Bird applied to a video editor position with the HPA and is now a paid staff member; Bird will resurface later in the book as a participant in some of the group’s Hunger Games and Not in Harry’s Name campaigns. Today, Bird remains more engaged by the fannish aspects—rather than the specifically political dimensions—of the organization’s mission.

This moment when Bird was able to put all of these pieces together—linking creative skills, fannish ties, and the desire to make a difference—represents an example of what Mimi Ito, Lissa Soep, and their collaborators (Ito et al. 2015) describe as “consequential connections,” a concept that has emerged from the MacArthur Foundation’s Connected Learning Initiative. Connected learning research (Ito et al., 2012) seeks to identify and map “the constructed features of the cultural and social environment that support connections, brokering, and translations across spheres of activity,” primarily in terms of the ways young people’s interests and activities within their homes or their peer culture relate to what gets valued by schools and other powerful institutions in their lives. Ito et al. (2015) argue, “Learning is most resilient and meaningful when it brings together multiple spheres of a young person’s life.” For Bird, school-based civics education failed to motivate civic action, whereas fan activism brought increased awareness and encouraged deploying recreational skills toward political ends.

A white paper on connected learning (Ito et al. 2012) describes some underlying assumptions:

Connected learning is socially embedded, interest-driven, and oriented toward expanding educational, economic or political opportunity. It is realized when a young person is able to pursue a personal interest or passion with the support of friends and caring adults, and is in turn able to link this learning and interest to academic achievement, career success or civic engagement. (42)

Young people often take more chances and invest more of themselves in their recreational lives than they do in the school environment, especially given today’s constant pressure to prepare for standardized testing. Such connections, the connected learning researchers conclude, are fluid as young people try out identities and explore interests, drilling deeper into those they find meaningful and moving on to others that look rewarding.

What these young people do for fun may move swiftly into forms of social and political engagement if, say, outside forces threaten the worlds they have built for themselves. For example, Rachel Cody Pfister (2014) shares a case study involving Hogwarts at Ravelry, a community of young knitters who came together as a consequence of their shared interests in all things Harry Potter. Through this community, participants articulated a “shared purpose, culture, identity” that empowered their civic actions. When the group sought to organize the “Ravelympic Games” in parallel with the official 2012 Olympics, they received a threatening letter from the U.S. Olympic Committee. The community used its social network to educate members about the stakes in this conflict, to brainstorm possible responses, to reach appropriate allies, and to shift public opinion. The parallels between the struggles of this crafting community in the Harry Potter fan realm and the kinds of civic activities that drew Lauren Bird to the Harry Potter Alliance should be clear enough; in both instances, fandom provided the conceptual resources, the shared identity, and the sense of collective empowerment required for political participation.

One of the key ways that networked communication has mattered (especially when coupled with the outreach efforts of the kinds of organizations we are studying) is in creating opportunities for youth to enter new kinds of communities and, through them, to open themselves to “consequential connections.” Another case in point is 15-year-old Enzo from Students for Liberty. Enzo attended a California high school where a majority of liberal-leaning students supported President Obama in the 2012 election; he knew of no other students who shared his budding interest in libertarian ideology: “There aren’t really any high school groups per se, and I’m probably the only libertarian at my high school because either everyone is gung ho about Barack Obama because it’s the fad or is just a Republican because their parents are. And so, I don’t really have a group or membership or anything. I’m just kind of there.” What’s more, at 15, he did not have a driver’s license, access to transportation, or the financial means to contact like-minded young people in his community. Instead, Enzo formed friendships with a group of young libertarians he met on Tumblr, using the space to learn more about the movement and to “try on” a new identity that diverged from his parents’ more conservative beliefs. Enzo, whose views on social issues like gay marriage led him to explore libertarianism, said, “There’s the generation gap; like the older generations aren’t as accepting of libertarianism as the newer ones are,” and explained that pursuing his interests online helped him steer around obstacles to participation:

Tumblr is a very good place to find like-minded stuff and discuss, so that’s where I met most of my libertarian friends. That’s where we mostly converse. They have invited me to some places but my parents won’t take me because they can’t afford it or it’s too late or it’s on a weeknight or something like that. It’s kind of hard, so it’s mostly online and stuff like that, and just talking to my friends at school and trying to convert them.

Enzo’s explanation reveals not only the possibilities of participating online but also the concrete limits around civic and political participation for young people, particularly those who have not reached voting age; many potentially meaningful connections are not fully realized because young people need adult support to fully pursue their emerging interests.

Participating in What?

Across this book, our focus is primarily on new and innovative political networks, which are choosing tactics and rhetorics that respond to the popular desire for meaningful participation. We are describing the mechanisms through which participants are struggling to achieve greater equality in their capacity to exert voice and influence within decision-making processes that will determine our collective futures. When critical theory is framed in a language of resistance, readers pretty much know what it is “the people” are resisting—neoliberalism, racism, homophobia, patriarchy, militarism, and so on. When the conversation turns to participation, theorists are forced to think about what is being built, what a more ideal society might look like, and the real-world roadblocks that make it difficult to achieve maximized forms of participation. Again and again, such discussions must return to the core question: Participating in what?

As researchers debate what kinds of spaces offer opportunities for meaningful participation, Carpentier (Jenkins and Carpentier 2013) proposes a productive distinction between “participating in” and “participating through” media. So, for example, while one is free to submit a wide array of videos through YouTube, the governance of that platform is controlled by its corporate owner, Google. No one can claim to be a citizen of YouTube, which is run for profit and not for the collective welfare. Unlike, for example, Hogwarts at Ravelry, the comments section on YouTube is notoriously uncivic, a space known for harsh and hateful posts, often directed by dominant groups against any and all forms of minority expression. Yet one study (Thorson et al. 2013) identifies thousands of videos posted by the Occupy movement on YouTube, videos that often challenged corporate interests and circulated at a range of scales from the hyperlocal to the global. Groups such as those involved in Occupy have forged strong political movements in part as a consequence of the ways they communicate with each other through YouTube, but they have remained at the mercy of the corporate interests that decide how free expression will be limited within this platform.

A distinction similar to the one just described can be drawn between participation within grassroots organizations that advocate for change and participation within the governance of the society. Young people are experimenting within participatory structures within their social and recreational lives, bringing some of those structures to the work they are doing as political agents. But these structures are not necessarily accepted within established political institutions and thus do not always influence public policy. We return to this question of what counts as politics in the book’s conclusion. Some young people are ambivalent about whether some of the projects we will discuss should be understood as political as opposed to purely cultural and educational. We wanted to flag the issue here as it is important to recognize that more work must be done before American democratic structures are going to be as fully and meaningfully participatory as many might desire.

Carpentier (Jenkins and Carpentier 2013) insists that for processes to be truly participatory, there must be equality and reciprocity between participants, a standard not fully met by every organization we discuss, let alone by the commercial platforms they use to pursue their goals. Yet the rhetoric of participation raises expectations about how power should be distributed—expectations that are expressed through struggles over terms of service—but also through the formation of alternative media networks that allow participants greater control over what happens to their materials. And we will see in Chapter 6, some groups opt out of traditional civic practices, such as voting, because they see them as less effective at promoting desired political changes than approaches emphasizing educational outreach and cultural change.

We will be especially interested in the roles organizations and networks play in fostering participatory politics. Young people often describe the language within which Americans conduct institutionalized politics as exclusive (in that you have to already be immersed in the system to understand what’s being said) and repulsive (in that the sharply partisan tone of current discourse turns politics into something that is divisive and disgusting). Ethan Zuckerman (2013b) argues that young people are turning to participatory politics because they see a failure in more traditional civic institutions and practices: “Here’s an ugly, but plausible, explanation for the shifting engagement in civics: It’s not that people aren’t interested in civics. They’re simply not interested in feeling ineffectual or helpless.” By contrast, the groups we study invite participation. They have strong incentives to recruit new members and to maintain the continued involvement of existing members. Members “care” about the issues, they “care” about their communities, and they “care” about their own identities as citizens. Such networks offer participants collective frames that can intensify individual members’ desires to make a difference (Kligler-Vilenchik et al. 2012).

These groups map ways in which individual participation can add up to something larger. They direct attention to specific issues and propose ways that people can work together to bring about change. They train members to produce their own media and tell their own stories. They offer networks through which this media can circulate and reach an engaged and appreciative audience. Above all, they create a context where “talking politics” is a normal, ongoing part of the group’s social interactions. Ethan Zuckerman (2013b) asks, “If civics is driven by passionate participation, how do we create a deliberative public space?” The answer may be to make civic and political discussions part of our everyday interactions with our friends and family, something sociologist Nina Eliasoph (1998) suggests is relatively rare; typically, people avoid discussing politics with people that matter to them because they seek to avoid conflict.

Robert Putnam (2000) famously described civic organizations—in his example, bowling leagues—as providing such a context for civic and political exchanges in midcentury America. Insofar as these new forms of participatory politics interject political messages into the same platforms young people use to share cute cat pictures, they also open a space where political deliberation becomes normative. Some may dismiss the idea that new political discourse might, for example, emerge from fan communities or gaming guilds, but keep in mind that Putnam’s bowling leagues were themselves sites of play—not serious in their goals, but nevertheless constituting shared spaces where publics could be formed, ties could be strengthened, and political values could be articulated. The YPP network’s large national survey has found that those people who engage in interest-driven networks online are five times as likely as those who aren’t involved to engage in participatory politics practices and nearly four times as likely to participate in forms of institutional practices. Such online communities may be as much a predictor of civic participation as traditional afterschool clubs such as newspaper, debate, or student government or service learning and community volunteering.

That said, if such groups are helping to facilitate the transition from participatory culture to participatory politics, they still are not as fully democratic as their participants might imagine. Neta Kligler-Vilenchik (2014) argues that not every kind of political conversation can occur within every cultural space: she has shown, for example, that the Nerdfighters have not been nearly as comfortable or as open with discussions of racial diversity and inequality as they have been in fostering discussions around sexual and gender identity politics, often falling back on the much-disputed idea of a “post-racial society” as a way of shutting out rather than opening up discussions about the role race plays in the lives of its participants. When social affiliation is less constrained by physical geography, participants may be drawn to different communities because of what they allow them to talk about. So while the civic imagination may perform some bridging functions in enabling messages to travel from one community to another, it may also enable some forms of exclusion, given that some popular representations are more accessible and more transparent to particular groups.

Peter Dahlgren (2003) has proposed a set of criteria by which we might assess the viability of civic culture. For democratic models of participation to be achieved, there need to be “minimal shared commitments to the vision and procedures of democracy, which in turn entails a capacity to see beyond the immediate interests of one’s own group” (156). The organizations and networks we discuss—to varying degrees—provide the preconditions for this kind of civic culture. These groups achieve this kind of political potential by fostering a shared set of values regarding what an ideal society might look like, encouraging a sense of affinity among members, enabling access to greater knowledge about the world and the issues they confront, modeling a set of democratic and participatory practices, helping youth to develop their identities as civic agents, and providing a context for meaningful political discussions. Dahlgren models these traits as a circuit; each builds upon the other, reinforcing the group’s progress toward supporting democratic participation. Even where all of these conditions are met, there still often needs to be some kind of catalyst that inspires this civic culture to take action around a particular concern. What we are calling participatory politics involves activities that foster one or another attribute of Dahlgren’s civic culture but also efforts to inspire and organize civic action. We will revisit these criteria in Chapter 3 as we discuss how fan organizations like the Harry Potter Alliance and Nerdfighters provide the preconditions for civic and political participation.

Across this opening chapter, we have introduced five foundational concepts (as well as a range of related vocabulary) that will inform the chapters that follow. First, we described how individuals and groups outside the dominant political structures are making use of emergent systems of narrative circulation to give their voices a strength and scope often unavailable to earlier generations. Second, we described the concept of transmedia mobilization/activism to stress ways young people are seeking to shape public opinion across a broad range of different platforms. Third, we discussed the civic imagination as opening up possibilities to envision alternatives and through them, to think about what kinds of change might be possible. Fourth, we talked about participatory politics as a set of practices that allow young people to deploy the skills they acquired through their everyday engagements with social media and participatory culture to change the world. And finally, we discussed connected learning in terms of the ways these organizations enhance their participants’ civic education, often by connecting the political realm to other activities they care about. We see close relationships between these core concepts, which suggest something about the media strategies, creative vision, organizational activities, and informal learning practices through which American youth are conducting politics in the early 21st century.

What Comes Next?

In the next five chapters, we examine each of our case study organizations. As we do so, we will expand the analytic vocabulary we use to discuss participatory politics. Chapter 2 considers Invisible Children as a group that struggles to reconcile its attempts to control the framing of its message and its dispersed network of young participants who help spread that message. Here we identify paradoxes that shape this and many other organizations that are trying to embrace participatory politics. Among the tensions we consider are those between goals and process, comprehensible and complex stories, activism and entertainment, consensus and contention, spreadable and drillable messages, and top-down and bottom-up approaches. We explore the ways that Invisible Children, in ramping up to Kony 2012, placed more emphasis on empowering youth to tell their own stories, yet following the backlash against the video, became progressively more centralized—ultimately disbanding its participatory activities, and finally announcing plans to shut down. At the same time, we rebut some of the criticisms directed against IC, showing how it was not exclusively reliant on a politics based on digital circulation but rather sought to prepare participants for more in-depth engagement with its mission through on-the-ground, face-to-face activities as well as the use of social media.

Chapter 3 considers the Harry Potter Alliance, Imagine Better, and the Nerdfighters as examples of fan activism. Over the years, these groups have addressed a range of different causes, rather than define themselves around a single mission, and they have relied on the larger infrastructures that have grown up around fan communities. Here we deepen our concept of the civic imagination, exploring how these groups harness the power of popular culture as an alternative, shared language through which to talk about politics. References to shared content worlds carry affective attachments for their members, offering more empowering fantasies about what it might mean to fight for social justice. We consider two different models—fannish civics and cultural acupuncture—that these groups deploy to mobilize public support. The difference between the two has to do with the depth of knowledge of the original content world each assumes. Fannish civics inspires fans as fans through their shared mastery of shared texts, whereas cultural acupuncture seeks to gain greater circulation by attaching a group’s messages to larger public conversations, often inspired by the release of a new entertainment product. This chapter also considers how shared tastes may provide the basis for the creation of “public spheres of the imagination,” places where people discuss shared values, hopes, and dreams. But the chapter also considers how a taste-based politics may exclude some would-be participants, insofar as taste is shaped by factors of class or race.

Chapter 4 explores the processes by which American Muslim youth are defining their identities and asserting their voices in the face of the political and social realities of post-9/11 America. If our work on the fan activists stresses that their shared interests in popular culture could provide a bridge into greater civic engagement, contrast that with the fact that speaking as an American Muslim is always already marked as a political stance, even if these youth see themselves as primarily speaking to shared cultural or spiritual interests. We consider a range of expressive projects that involve asserting the diversity of American Muslims identities in relation to the concept of a precarious public—that is, one where there is a considerable gap between voice and influence. What makes the groups and networks we look at especially precarious is the tension between their members’ desires to insure that their life stories get told and the fear that they are going to become the focus of surveillance by various government agencies or suffer the consequences of “social surveillance” by conservative parents and religious leaders, or online “haters.” For American Muslim youth, constructing their own, alternative narratives involves considerable risks and understandable anxieties, and we take a look at the important role humor plays in easing some of those strains.

Chapter 5 explores the nature of political storytelling from a different perspective—that of undocumented youth raised in America who are supporting the DREAM Act, which they hope will offer them a path to citizenship and, more immediately, reliable access to higher education. A spectacular example of transmedia mobilization, this loose network has sustained its efforts over many years via creative, evolving uses of social media and networked communication, in concert with on-the-ground activities. Here our primary focus is on the production of “coming out” videos, through which these young people share stories of their own experience of risk and vulnerability as a means of forging a stronger, collective voice. Throughout this chapter, we identify a range of both personal and collective reasons why coming out online was an important and effective tactic during the formation of this movement. We also highlight the risks DREAMers confront in acknowledging their immigration status in such a public fashion.

With Chapter 6, we return to the question of how the mechanisms of participatory politics relate to institutional politics (the source of some of the paradoxes we discuss in Chapter 2). Our focus is on Students for Liberty, one wing of what has been described as “second-wave libertarianism.” Unlike first-wave libertarians, this movement is more invested in bringing about change through educational and cultural activities than through party politics. On the one hand, these young libertarians receive financial resources and other support from conservative think tanks and individual funders, whose influence on many right-of-center movements in the United States raises questions about whether any such movements can be described as grassroots. Yet these youth are also tapping YouTube and social media to assert their own voices, much like the other groups we have discussed. And many of them are “strategic nonvoters.” Despite being well informed and deeply engaged in political debates, they do not see voting as the appropriate mechanism for promoting their causes given the corrupt nature of the current governmental system. Here, again, we see the tension between narrowing opportunities for participation in institutional politics and an expanded capacity for voice via new media.

Chapter 7 pulls together many insights about participatory politics from across the book, exploring what these case study groups share and how they differ. We revisit some core concepts established in this opening chapter, including participatory politics, transmedia mobilization, and the civic imagination. We start the chapter with a story that illustrates the ambivalence many young people feel about being activists, their uncertain position somewhere between participatory culture and institutional politics, and the messages they have internalized from adult commentators that their characteristic forms of political action don’t count. We end the chapter with another story—this one illuminating the generational divide between historic civil rights leaders and their contemporary counterparts—and some criteria by which we might determine which forms of participatory politics are effective, for whom, and toward what ends.

An Afterword, contributed by Lissa Soep from Youth Radio—a national youth-driven production company based in Oakland, California—returns us to this chapter’s discussion of connected learning. Soep also compares and contrasts the core case studies, outlining which theories of learning might help us to understand how these groups are recruiting and empowering American youth as civic and political agents. Her observations here are primarily aimed at educators, but understanding the underlying pedagogical assumptions shaping these organizations is key to understanding the role they play in the lives of American youth.

Beyond this, we have also developed digital resources you can use to learn more about participatory politics. Check out our By Any Media Necessary website at byanymedia.org. This site assembles an archive of activist videos, including those described in the book and those produced by a range of other networks and organizations, which sample the range of genres and rhetorical practices through which today’s young citizens promote their causes. This archive also includes videos produced for the project by Participant Media and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s HitRecord project, which we hope will generate discussions in classes and within civic organizations around digital citizenship. We also include lesson plans for exemplary workshops to help students better understand the core principles and practices of participatory politics. Educators from the National Writing Project and the National Association for Media Literacy Education have been working with us to share and test this site and its materials in the classroom. We hope this resource provides readers, especially educators but also activists, a chance to extend this book’s analysis to explore a broader array of contemporary political and civic practices.