Social Media and Civic Engagement. Scott P. Robertson
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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
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