Eric Gordon - Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice

edited by Eric Gordon and Paul Mihailidis

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2016 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Stone Sans and Stone Serif by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gordon, Eric, 1973- editor. | Mihailidis, Paul, 1978- editor.

Title: Civic media : technology, design, practice / Eric Gordon and Paul

Mihailidis, eds.

Description: Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, [2015] | Includes bibliographical

references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015039701 | ISBN 9780262034272 (hardcover : alk. paper)

eISBN 9780262334235

Subjects: LCSH: Mass mediaPolitical aspects. | Digital media--Political

aspects. | Political participation. | Political

participation--Technological innovations. | Internet in public

administration.

Classification: LCC P95.8 .C4858 2015 | DDC 302.23dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015039701

10987654321

Dedicated to all those who have inspired us by inventing, adopting, or adapting media to make positive change in the world.

Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice is the largest, most collaborative intellectual project we have ever attempted. To get to publication, it has taken inspiration, collaboration, consultation, and criticism. It has taken scores of authors to trust in the idea and contribute their work, an editor to believe in the project, extensive comments from anonymous reviewers, and students and research assistants toiling away because they truly care about the work.

We are grateful to the dozens of contributing authors, who, when approached in 2013 about an ambitious project that would attempt to map the growing space of research and practice of civic media, enthusiastically agreed to contribute. Their collective effort and enthusiastic engagement in the project has been inspiring to us and has served as a constant source of motivation throughout the long editorial process. We are so grateful to all the contributors and their persistent passion and professionalism during our seemingly endless barrage of comments and requests.

We want to acknowledge all those who have read drafts, discussed ideas, and generally tolerated our obsession over the last several years. Our colleagues and fellows at the Engagement Lab at Emerson College, including Catherine DIgnazio, Miranda Banks, Russell Newman, Vincent Reynauld, and Sarah Zaidan, provided valuable feedback on an early draft of the introduction. Engagement Lab staff Stephen Walter and Christina Wilson provided feedback and support throughout. Jay Vachon provided technical support, Aidan ODonahue created the beautiful artwork on the website, and Jedd Cohen led the design of the learning guide that accompanies the case studies. But everything would have been at a standstill, if not for project manager Becky Michelson, and research assistants Roma Dash and Marissa Koors, who worked on the details, day in and day out, with such professionalism and passion for the end product.

In addition to the print book, this project has a significant online component called The Civic Media Project. Launching in early 2015 with nearly 100 case studies, this compendium to the book is meant to flesh out the context of civic media by providing a space for the rigorous documentation and discussion of examples. To host this project, we partnered with the team at the University of Southern California who built the online publishing platform Scalar. Pushing on the boundaries of publishing, Scalar helped us imagine the multimedia form that the book would ultimately take. None of this would have been possible without the support from that magnificent team, including Tara McPherson, Steve Anderson, Lex Taylor, and Craig Dietrich, who provided technical, content, and moral support throughout production. And of course, we are greatly indebted to all the case study authors who provided compelling portraits of civic media in action from around the world.

Finally, we want to acknowledge our friends and family who have been hearing about this project for some time, and who traveled along that sometimes-rocky path from interest to acceptance as the years dragged on. For Eric, his wife Justeen Hyde has been an inspiration and critic, and has provided moral, emotional, and intellectual guidance throughout. And his kids, Elliot and Adeline, are the two biggest reasons he does this work: the promise of ethically being in the world in spite of and because of the media they produce and consume, is what drives him every day. And for Paul, his wife Amy, working in public education, has been a source of inspiration and reflection, and his daughters, Emma and Mae, whose budding engagement with media for civic life make this work all the more meaningful.

What does civic engagement look like in a digital age? What does it mean to participate in civic life when the lines between online and offline, political and social, organization and network are increasingly blurred? And what happens when civic life is professionalized, when institutions and communities seek to understand and capitalize on motivations for people to engage in public matters? Offices of civic engagement are cropping up in universities, governments, and corporations, to communicate that the institution is connected and relevant to social life. Many university offices of service learning, focused on giving back, have transformed to offices of civic engagement, focused on involving outside communities in the mission of teaching and research. Municipal governments have made a similar transition from neighborhood services to hubs of civic engagement and community action. Cities throughout the world have opened civic innovation offices. The White House now houses an office of social innovation and civic participation to support bottom-up, community-driven civic engagement initiatives. Civic engagement is increasingly part of the discourse of civil society programs in international development organizations (). So, too, has the private technology sector embraced the language of civics. Microsoft founded a dedicated office of civic technology, and companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter have put resources into civic innovation, blurring the lines between customers and citizens. While these offices and initiatives were once primarily considered community benefits (often a form of charitable afterthought), in recent years they have migrated to the center of institutions, suggesting that civic life is part of the infrastructure of consumerism and governance. At a time when information is so easily accessible to so many, when connections are so easily formed, and when the porousness between work life and personal life is so significant, the space of civics has become integrated into the norms of work, social, and personal life. Civic engagement, in this regard, expands beyond its traditional manifestations of voting, paying taxes, volunteerism, and town meeting attendance, and comes to represent the texture of everyday lifethe interface among individuals, their communities, and public institutions.

While one can argue that civic life is simply a promotional trendconcepts of connectivity, sharing, community, and democracy, so well rehearsed in Silicon Valley conversations about market valuation, have seeped into other institutional forms and emerged within a watered-down discourse of civic engagementone can just as easily make the case that this discourse represents a structural shift toward participatory and accessible institutions, and heightened citizen expectations that they embrace such shifts. The reality is likely a bit of both: the structural transformation of institutions to accommodate greater participation and feedback, and the corresponding commodification and promotion of that transformation. In any case, the result is a dramatic increase in the channels available to people to participate in what we now call civic life. So whether the language of civic engagement is mobilized to sell a product or change policy, there is need to understand it in the new situated space of digital culture. In its newly centralized position, civics has moved from a space of duty and virtue, facilitated by traditional mechanisms of participation, to a space of personal interest, care, and self-actualization, facilitated by a multitude of media platforms (). Corporate and government players are acknowledging, celebrating, and exploiting these new platforms as the expansive interface between private life and public institutions (Gordon and Walter, chapter 15); underrepresented populations are imagining how they can obtain a voice (Mihailidis and Gerodimos, chapter 24); and global networks of activists are connecting and assembling to force change (Bennett and Segerberg, chapter 3; Milan, chapter 4). In this formulation, there is little distinction between civic life and the media that facilitate it. We call this