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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

1.1 TECHNOLOGY AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

Historically, towns, villages, and cities had an area in which people gathered for common purpose—for example, to obtain food in the marketplace or gather water at the well. When people get together they like to talk politics, broadly defined, and in such public spaces, the state of political affairs and the foibles of the state’s rulers have certainly always been discussed along with other shared concerns such as the weather and the latest gossip. Since the advent of democratic government, and especially as its inclusiveness has broadened, citizens have used public spaces to deliberate and make decisions about how their government, both local and national, works.

Most modern urban environments no longer have a central well or its physical equivalent. Many previously public activities have moved into the private domain. Supermarkets are not marketplaces, but rather commercial ventures designed to encourage shopping and discourage interaction. In many places, especially in the age of perceived global terrorism, modern public spaces such as transportation hubs and parks have restrictions on congregation and discourse among strangers. But in contemporary society a new kind of public space has emerged. Networked computing environments, ubiquitous mobile platforms, convergent media, and social software have combined to enable digital civic engagement and perhaps create new forms of civic participation.

While a small group may come to consensus through discussion amongst themselves, a larger group, and most certainly groups at the size of towns and nations, must develop organizational structures through which the expressions of individuals may flow to decision makers who are, in turn, empowered to make decisions, take actions, and enforce policies and practices. Thus, representative government and deliberative politics depend on the ability of individuals to express themselves using both information transfer and communication techniques that span distances and also more intimate spaces of some kind or another to allow for immediate deliberation and discourse.

Systems of messengers such as the ancient Greeks and the League of the Iroquois, and later the postal system riders of colonial America, allowed for the practice of collective decision making and governance at a distance. Such systems must support, on the one hand, delivery of information about the desires of individuals (collected in various ways) to a centralized location where they can be collected and considered by empowered representatives, and, on the other hand, delivery of the decisions of the representatives back to the people for action. Depending on the physical distribution of the polity, such communications were conducted on a time scale of weeks and months. But, in the contemporary period, communication technology has changed these processes considerably. The advent of the telegraph and telephone reduced the time scale for information transfer to mere seconds. The advent of social media has now reduced the time scale for transfer of information among members of a community, and between municipal or government representatives and their polities, to instantaneous.

In the West, with the advent of a proto-democratic tradition in ancient Greece came an official space for political discourse: the Agora. In the agoras of Greek city-states, citizens—a class largely limited to male land owners—gathered to hear proclamations, witness trials, hear philosophical lectures, and debate and vote on political and civic issues. Over time, as the concept of citizen has expanded, so too has the breadth of spaces dedicated to critical civic and political discourse.

Political theory has recently taken what Dryzek (2000) refers to as a deliberative turn, which refers to an emphasis on communication about political and civic matters, hence placing politics and engagement into a sphere of social activities. Effective political and civic deliberation is contingent upon the ability of the discourse to prompt reflection and ultimately result in a collective outcome. In fact, Dryzek felt even at the end of the millennium that the state of affairs was better described in terms of what he called discursive democracy (Dryzek, 1990), where discussion of many types—including not only rational and/or persuasive argument, but also sarcasm, humor, gossip, storytelling, appeal to emotion, and more—leads to reflection and in which individual states have less and less control over a discourse that is increasingly international. Introduce social media, a sociotechnical grab bag of every sort of rhetorical and discursive communication available, into this frame at the beginning of the new millenium, and social media’s central role in reshaping civic and political life becomes obvious.

Jürgen Habermas (1989) famously traced the evolution of what he called the “public sphere” (discussed at length in Chapter 3) through 19th- and early 20th-century Europe as it expanded into a more bourgeois society of merchants and other middle-class citizens. He proposed that these citizens increasingly engaged in “rational-critical debate” in the cafes and salons that emerged, at least in part, for this purpose. In the age of the internet, many sociotechnical and political theorists have moved quickly to discuss the implications of a digitally mediated public sphere (Benkler, 2006; Boeder, 2005; Castells, 2009; Dahlberg, 2001; Dahlgren, 2005, 2009, 2016; Papacharissi, 2002, 2009, 2010; Poor, 2005), and this discussion evolves with the speed of digital innovation and contemporary cultural liquidity.

Today, although shaky at times, most democratic polities embrace at least the concept of participation of all classes. The advent of mass media in the 20th century has allowed for information to flow easily to such a wide swath of the public who might not otherwise find themselves in common spaces in which to engage in discourse. Many public and civic spaces in the current period, then, have become “de-physicalized.” One of the many virtual spaces we inhabit includes space for public discourse, and the nature and use of such space is an ongoing topic of interest to scholars in communication, information science, political science, and other fields.

The appearance of social media and widespread social-media enhancements to a plethora of internet environments at the start of the 21st century has added a new twist to the contemporary understanding of civic participation. The advent of these tools, which are radically non-authoritarian when compared, for example, to television, have raised the question of whether a new era of civic engagement is underway. Papacharissi (2010) suggests that citizens today encounter civic society as a hybrid environment of overlapping private and public spheres and that citizenship itself is experienced in a highly fluid manner.

Technology utopians view the appearance of networked information sharing environments as an unrivaled democratizing force (Benkler, 2006; Nisbet, Stoycheff and Pearce, 2012; Rheingold, 2000; Stoycheff and Nisbet, 2014; Valenzuela, Park, and Key, 2009), which can both enhance the effectiveness of already engaged citizens (Bimber, 1999; DiMaggio et al, 2004; Krueger, 2002; Norris, 2000, 2001; Polat, 2005; Weber, Loumakis, and Bergman, 2003) and bring new citizens into the fold (Delli Carpini, 2000; Krueger, 2002; Ward, Gibson, and Lusoli, 2003; Weber, Loumakis, and Bergman, 2003). On the other hand, technology pessimists find that issues like inequitable access, surveillance, the viral spread of rumors and fake news, and the echo chamber of selected friends and hyper-targeted media preempt the usefulness of digital networks for democratic discourse (Gerhards and Schäfer, 2010; Kaufhold, Valenzuela and De Zúñiga, 2010; Putnam, 1995, 2000; Stroud, 2008; Sunstein, 2007). Of course, the truth is much more nuanced and complicated, requiring consideration of what kinds of people are using which platforms in which contexts for what purposes (Boullianne, 2009). In this book, we will examine the use of recently emerging social information and computing technologies as they have been appropriated for use in civic, political, and other contexts of public participation.

Voida et al. (2014) find that literature on e-government systems tends to be grouped into three values themes. First is the value of access, or the ability of citizens to acquire information and have influence on their governments. The second is efficiency, a value that stresses cost-cutting and tame-saving features of digital services. Finally, the value of education stresses how e-government systems can increase awareness and understanding of civic and governmental processes, hence making citizens more informed, reflective, and empowering them to be more active in their civic contexts.

1.2 CIVIC ENGAGEMENT

It makes sense to begin by asking what we mean by the term civic engagement. There have been many takes on defining what civic engagement means, but an overview of several reveals that there are commonalities.

The Center for Information on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), which studies youth engagement, divides civic engagement into three categories (Keeter et al., 2002):

• Civic activities

• Electoral activities

• Political voice

Civic activities include volunteering for non-electoral organizations, membership in groups or associations, participation in fundraising for causes, and community problem solving. Electoral activities include voting on a regular basis; persuading others; displaying buttons, signs, or stickers; making campaign contributions; and volunteering in political campaigns or for political organizations. Political voice involves contacting officials or media, protesting, petitioning, canvassing, and engaging in political actions such as boycotts.

Korn and Voida (2015) distinguish between two major forms of civic engagement as viewed through the lens of human-computer interaction. In the first, designers and researchers work within mainstream political contexts, for example to create e-government services, to make voting more straightforward and accessible, to seek input from citizens on government actions, and to enable and foster debate and deliberation. In the second, designers and researchers work outside of mainstream political channels, for example to support the work of activists, non-governmental organizations, protesters, and others in non-official capacities.

Another approach to understanding civic engagement is to focus on processes involved in various stages of action and on the contexts that enable and influence the effectiveness of these processes. For example, Gordon, Baldwin-Philippi, and Balestra (2013) delineate three major activities that constitute most forms of civic engagement:

• Acquiring and processing information

• Voicing and debating opinions and beliefs

• Taking action

They point out that, although taking action is often considered to be the most desirable form of civic engagement, acquiring information and debating issues are equally important and serve to inform action. This becomes critically important when we consider social media, especially as it has evolved from an information-sharing environment into a more active participation environment.

Along similar lines, Norris (2001) believes that civic engagement with regard to politics entails three important factors:

• Political knowledge

• Political trust

• Political participation

Political knowledge is what people learn about political issues, candidates, and affairs from consuming media and talking with others. Political trust is the sense of support for political institutions and political actors. Political participation involves the various ways that citizens take action to influence how government works or to impact the decision making of politicians. Norris calls out trust because it can be seen as having an impact on confidence in government systems and therefore it serves as a facilitator of participation. Researchers have extensively examined how the internet shapes all of these factors, perhaps leading to increased knowledge, increased trust, and greater participation (Kenski and Stroud, 2010).

Several researchers suggest that computer-mediated interactions have positive effects on community engagement and civic involvement (Donath and boyd, 2004; Hampton and Wellman, 2003; Kavanaugh et al., 2005; Resnick, 2001). For example, internet users are more likely than non-internet users to be involved in civic and political activities such as attending a political rally, trying to influence a vote, and actually voting or reporting intention to vote—and frequent Facebook users are even more highly engaged in these civic/political activities (Hampton et al., 2011; Raine and Smith, 2012). Facebook users maintain many types of relationships within the site and seem to gain and maintain social capital from its use (Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe, 2007; Resnick, 2001; Wellman et al., 2001).

So, “civic engagement” can be construed as any activity performed by people that is relevant to their community, society, culture, nation, or to issues of global citizenship. This covers both active and passive forms of engagement, although these stances toward engagement can be hard to distinguish from each other. For example, an individual might read the posts of a politician and the comments of other citizens on a social media platform, but never post themselves. While this lurking behavior is often classified as passive, it does require that the individual find the material and make decisions about what to look at. Presumably, it is also performed for a purpose related to civic participation, such as learning about a candidate and understanding their positions or judging their popularity.

Perhaps we should view participation as varying on continua across at least two axes: intensity of discussion and intensity of action. Intensity of discussion refers to the content of what is posted on social media. Instead of a dichotomy of participation (posting something) versus non-participation (lurking), we may view participation intensity on an ordinal scale anchored on one end by lurking and on the other by continuous engagement with many others in prolonged discourse. With regard to action, a similar ordinal scale exists with people who take in information at one end and people who participate in real-world activity such as voting, petition signing, demonstrating, and participating in revolt on the other. Social media affords civic engagement by users in all parts of this intensity-action space.

1.3 SOCIAL MEDIA

In this book, we are concerned primarily with the impact of social media on civic engagement. Although bulletin boards and other community-oriented media have been around for a while, social media as we know it today began at the start of the 21st century. The earliest pure social networking sites—Friendster, LinkedIn, and MySpace—were launched in 2002–2003. The first YouTube video was uploaded in 2005. Twitter was started in 2006. Facebook opened to a non-restrictive membership also in 2006. Other rapidly growing social media platforms such as Reddit, Instagram, and Snapchat are even younger.

A definitional part of the concept of Web 2.0, social media includes computing platforms that allow users to interact with each other, to share and augment media content such as news articles, and to post, comment on, and respond to media of all kinds, including text, images, video, and music. A critical feature of social media is that it is a prosumer environment, involving all participants in both the production and consumption aspects of its use (Ritzer and Jurgenson, 2010). Thus, the content of social media is largely user-generated, although users now post journalistic media, news, and other professionally produced material as well, and social media platforms have evolved a much more seamless integration of these different types of materials. Similarly, while there are different platforms for different media types—Instagram for pictures and YouTube for videos, for example—social media sites are also now moving to integration of material across platforms and are also supporting multiple media types within their own environments. The typical newsfeed on Facebook, by far the most popular social media environment, will contain text posts from friends and friends-of-friends; pictures from friends and acquaintances; embedded videos from friends, organizations, and professional sources; embedded news and magazine stories from multiple sources; jokes and memes from friends and organizations; updates on travel; targeted advertising; links and reposts from microblogs like Twitter or image platforms like Instagram; and so on.

All of these features may be reacted to instantly with a range of emotional expressions and may be commented on in a threaded comment section with text or any other content of the types mentioned above. In other words, these environments have become complex, multifaceted, multimedia, multisource information firehoses that mix social, commercial, civic, and other matters mercilessly. They are accessible at any time through mobile devices and visited multiple times per day by literally billions of users.

Social media can be a stand-alone environment or platform in which users maintain a friend, acquaintance, and/or follower network, and typically intermingle content sharing and information dissemination activities in multiple spheres (e.g., entertainment, politics, news, etc.). Social media can also be an added feature to other application environments, for example as a commenting area on news stories or videos, or as a Twitter feed embedded in a web application. Seamless integration of social networking applications with content-supplying applications has been achieved by many popular platforms. Many traditional online media outlets provide liking and sharing buttons that instantly move content into a social media stream where it can be immediately viewed by friends and followers, embellished, and rebroadcast throughout the network. Most recently, traditional news outlets such as the New York Times have entered into deals to integrate their content directly into social media feeds without the need for sharing. This widespread integration of social media functions within other applications, in conjunction with the fact that many users maintain an open, background social media application while doing other things on the internet, makes it difficult to assess exactly when internet users are engaged in social media activity, or more accurately it makes it difficult to assess when they are not engaged in social media activity. In fact, it is probably best to assume that for many internet users social networking is a constant state, either potential or realized.

The Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project has been tracking multiple aspects of the use of social media since its inception. Sixty-five percent of American adults now use social networking sites (Perrin, 2015). The highest usage is by younger people in the age range of 18–29 (90%), although other age groups also report moderate to high usage (77% of 30–49 year olds, 51% of 50–64 year olds, 35% of people over 65 years of age), and of course the growth rate is dramatic. Women use social networking sites slightly more than men (women = 68%, men = 62%). More highly educated individuals with higher household incomes are greater users of social media, however no educational or income group falls under 50% usage of social networking platforms anymore. Greenwood, Perrin, and Duggan (2016) report extremely high use of multiple social media sites among online Americans, with Facebook leading the pack at a usage rate of 79% of all online Americans. Instagram, Pintrest, LinkedIn, and Twitter follow with usage rates of 32%, 31%, 29%, and 24% respectively. Three-quarters of Facebook users visit the site every day, and half of them visit it multiple times per day. More than half of social media users visit multiple sites.

The advent of social media was a game changer for community computing. Suddenly, community activities that designers had been trying to support in various civic computing environments were available for appropriation in a handful of popular social networking sites. Many community, civic, and even governmental interactive functions are now accomplished via integrated social media sites.

Social media platforms have been implicated in a variety of political movements such as the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement in the U.S. (Caren and Gaby, 2011); the 2010–2012 Arab-Spring related uprisings throughout the Middle East including Tunisia (Kavanaugh et al., 2016; Wulf et al., 2013b), spreading to Egypt (Khamis and Vaughn, 2011; Lim, 2012; Tufeckci and Wilson, 2012) and Turkey (Dincelli, Hong, and DePaula, 2016); Karkin et al., 2015; Varol et al., 2014), and elsewhere (Howard and Hussain, 2011); occupied West Bank villages (Wulf et al., 2013a); and other significant populist movements globally (Shirky, 2011). They have played increasingly important roles in elections in mature democracies (Vitak et al., 2011), and are playing significant roles in connecting citizens to each other and to their governments in many emerging democracies (Morozov, 2009). Social media is used increasingly as an important part of digital government initiatives throughout the world. Barak Obama established the @POTUS Twitter tag in early 2015 and became the first sitting American president to join the Facebook social network later that same year. Manipulation of social media to influence elections is one of the biggest stories of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and as of this writing (2018), a newly elected president Donald Trump is blazing a trail as an everyday user of the Twitter microblogging site (@realDonaldTrump) to express thoughts, emotions, and reactions that seem spontaneous and un-vetted.

In addition to direct use for the activities of civic engagement, social media now plays an important role in news dissemination, and hence in information gathering relevant to political action and political opinion. Sixty-two percent of American adults get news from social media sources (Gottfried and Shearer, 2016). Again, the role of news varies considerably depending on the social media site in question. Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter provide the greatest opportunities for exposure to news and information within their platforms, with 70% of Reddit users, 66% of Facebook users, and 59% of Twitter users reporting that they get news from these respective platforms. Thirty-one percent of Tumblr users report getting news from that site. Other sites fall well under 25%. The dominance of Facebook as a social media platform, combined with its large role as a source of news, make it the primary social media source of news for American adults (Greenwood, Perrin, and Duggan, 2016). In earlier reports, a little more than one third (36%) of social networking site users say that these platforms are important for keeping up with political news in particular (Raine and Smith, 2012). Again, at the current time (2018), the organized creation and dissemination of “fake news” to influence political opinion is under increased scrutiny.

Research on the use of social media by citizens to interact with government has focused on three modes of information dissemination: one-way push, two-way pull, and networking (Meijer and Thaens, 2013; Mergel, 2013a). Despite the advent of social media, research to date has shown that government use of social media is largely one-way, with many local governments still using a “push” model in which information flows from the government to the citizen (Mergel, 2013b; Mossberger, Wu, and Crawford, 2013). DePaula and Dincelli (2016) characterized Facebook posts of municipal-level government agencies in the U.S. to be mainly push oriented (policy announcements and public service announcements), secondarily impression management oriented (marketing, political positioning, positive imagery and favorable publicity), in small amounts (<8%) networking oriented (calls for discussion, dialog, and volunteers), and in very small amounts (<3%) pull oriented (requests for feedback, fundraising).

1.4 ORGANIZATION

In Chapter 2, we trace some history of the use of information and computing systems (ICSs) in civic contexts. We divide this history into pre- and post-social periods since the emergence of social media can be seen as a revolutionary turn in the emergence and adoption of ICSs in civic and government contexts. In Chapter 3, we explore theories that arise in the literature frequently. Theories relevant to this book are highly interdisciplinary, coming from political science, sociology, network science, and informatics and information science. In Chapter 4, we take a tour of the many studies of social media and civic engagement, dividing them into engagements with the orderly democratic process and then engagements in situations of protest and resistance. In Chapter 5 we conclude by discussing challenges that have emerged.