Participatory Media to better enable Civic Engagement

Howard Rheingold writes in Using Participatory Media and Public Voice to Encourage Civic Engagement

Teaching young people how to use digital media to convey their public voices could connect youthful interest in identity exploration and social interaction with direct experiences of civic engagement. Learning to use blogs (“web logs,” web pages that are regularly updated with links and opinion), wikis (web pages that non-programmers can edit easily), podcasts (digital radio productions distributed through the Internet), and digital video as media of self-expression, with an emphasis on “public voice,” should be considered a pillar—not just a component—of twenty-first-century civic curriculum. Participatory media that enable young people to create as well as consume media are popular among high school and college students. Introducing the use of these media in the context of the public sphere is an appropriate intervention for educators because the rhetoric of democratic participation is not necessarily learnable by self-guided point-and-click experimentation. The participatory characteristics of online digital media are described, examples briefly cited, the connection between individual expression and public opinion discussed, and specific exercises for developing a public voice through blogs, wikis, and podcasts are suggested. A companion wiki provides an open-ended collection of resources for educators:

SocialText and Media Literacy

And you can get Howard's first chapter here

In the age of the search engine, the ability to think critically about media sources, their credibility and truth claims are vital for all of us.

The vast repository of information available online has changed forever our certainty about authority.
As such, the locus of responsibility for determining the accuracy of texts has shifted from the publisher to the reader.

So, the ability to be critical, and to ask the right questions is a key skill in terms of media literacy.
However, computer literacy programs in contemporary education have missed out critical thinking from the list of skills being taught to young people.

Critical thinking is, however, regarded by some as a plot to incite children to question authority, and perhaps not something that belongs in the classroom.

As a consequence, the key literacies required of these digital natives are diverging from the school environment.

Henry Jenkins wrote Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century

According to a recent study from the Pew Internet & American Life project (Lenhardt & Madden, 2005),more than one-half of all teens have created media content,and roughly one- third of teens who use the Internet have shared content they produced.In many cases, these teens are actively involved in what we are calling participatory cultures.A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement,strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations,and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices.A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter,and feel some degree of social con- nection with one another (at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).Forms of participatory culture include:

Affiliations — memberships,formal and informal,in online communities centered
around various forms of media,such as Friendster,Facebook,message boards,
metagaming,game clans,or MySpace).

Expressions — producing new creative forms,such as digital sampling, skinning and
modding, fan videomaking,fan fiction writing, zines,mash-ups).

Collaborative Problem-solving — working together in teams,formal and informal,
to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (such as through Wikipedia, alternative reality gaming,spoiling).

Circulations — Shaping the flow of media (such as podcasting, blogging).

So anyone interested in this area should be following what Howard and Henry have to say.

On this blog and in our book we identified that that the language of our post modern culture can be one of Participation, Collaboration, Co-creation, Group Forming Networks, Authenticity, Trust, and Engagement.

Although starting from a perspective of Marketing Communications we have seen enough material where as Yochai Benkler believes we are living in a Wealth of Networks a notion that is so dramatic that it fundamentally challenges how markets and democracies have co-evolved over the last 150 years.

Today we live in a networked society. Digital information technology, the economics of networked information production and the social practices of networked conversations, qualitatively change the role that individuals can play in cultural and knowledge production and dissemination. Communities are sticky in ways that mass media never was, it requires a very different approach to what we create, how we create it and how we market it.

Enabled by technological change, we are beginning to see a series of economic, social, and cultural adaptations that make possible a radical transformation of how we make the information environment we occupy as autonomous individuals, citizens, and members of cultural and social groups. It seems passe´ today to speak of “the Internet revolution.” In some academic circles, it is positively naïve. But it should not be. The change brought about by the networked information environment is deep. It is structural. It goes to the very foundations of how liberal markets and liberal democracies have coevolved for almost two centuries.

Here are out writings on Education And our thoughts on Participation

Public voice and the Digital Native
Public voice is a way to link media skills and civic engagement. Kids in online social network environments are creating publics online in an era when physical public spaces are increasingly denied to them. A significant amount of young people are involved in creating as well as consuming digital media. According to a 2005 survey, the number of teenagers using the internet has grown 24 % in the past four years, and 87% of those are between the ages of 12 and 17 are online. They are anything but passive media consumers. They seek, adopt, appropriate and invent ways to participate in cultural production. The internet is not a transformative new technology for them, but a feature of their lives that has always been there, like running water and electricity. This population is both self-guided and in need of guidance, and although a willingness to learn new media by point-and-click exploration might come naturally to today's student cohort, there's nothing innate about knowing how to apply their skills to the processes of democracy.

Participative media is possibly a powerful tool for helping young people to engage in their own voices about the issues that they care about. The network is more powerful than the node, as someone once told me.

Engagement is about context and meaning. Without context there can be no meaning and therefore no reason to engage.

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