Social Media and Civic Engagement. Scott P. Robertson
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Information dissemination from government to citizens (G2C).
• Rudimentary two-way communication between government and citizens such as e-mail (G2C and C2G).
• Online transaction processing, e.g., licensing, permitting, payments. In later stages voting and rulemaking (participation in legislation).
• Citizen engagement in highly interactive and collaborative endeavors in support of civic, governmental, and political activities (C2C, sometimes referred to as “government 2.0”).
• Collaborative, open government (includes leveraging of citizen-generated data and crowdsourcing of civic solutions both in collaboration with, and independent of, government).
Bimber (2000) argued at the beginning of the century for abandonment of ideas like “cyber-democracy” or “e-government,” which imply that a new of civic participation is emerging from use of the internet and other information technologies:
“Analysis of civic engagement might well proceed, I believe, by modeling a civic landscape that is growing increasingly information rich and communication intensive, rather than one that is permeated by one technology or another. Technologies change and evolve over time, of course, but the trend toward lower and lower marginal costs of information and communication will likely continue for the foreseeable future. If information technology is a cause, its proximate effect is to create societies that are in many ways more information rich and communication intensive, societies where the marginal cost of information and communication is very low. The question, then, becomes one of understanding the ultimate effects that follow from those new informational circumstances” (Bimber, 2000, p. 331).
Bimber argues that instead of considering the internet to be revolutionary, we should consider it to be one in a long series of changes (albeit, a dramatic change) in the history of information management (Castells, 1996), and that research should focus on how organizations and individuals adapt their practices accordingly. Bimber’s argument is that we should view changes in civic engagement in the era of the internet as an evolutionary adaptation to dramatic shifts in the global information ecology.
A significant feature of the internet, according to Bimber (2000), is the reduction in “information cost,” or the reduction in resources required to produce and disseminate information broadly and swiftly. He predicted many outcomes with regard to political and civic participation, including:
• greater fragmentation and pluralism in the structure of civic engagement as information efforts become more specialized and focused;
• replacing of large political organizations that persist through multiple events (e.g., political parties) with more flexible, special-issue, and temporary ad-hoc groups;
• a rise in smaller political parties and reduction in the power of big parties;
• more rapid cycling of the political agenda and acceleration of the pace of the public agenda;
• a “deinstitutionalization” of civic life;
• a multiplication in opportunities for learning about civic issues and becoming involved in activism;
• a potential for limiting perception of the common public good as aggregates of special interests gain more of the public attention and set more of the public agenda; and
• a potential trade-off between liberty and deliberation about the common good.
Several researchers, in studies of use of electronic portals like BEV, found that early adopters tended to be more civic minded than those who began using civic components of the internet later (Kohut, 1999; Patterson and Kavanaugh, 2001; Kavanaugh and Patterson, 2001). They argue that increases in civic engagement and community involvement that seem to be internet related are actually a phase of technology adoption rather than a true change in behavior.
2.3 OPEN GOVERNMENT
As early as the 1950s it was recognized that data collected by the government was useful when aggregated across silos and also that it should be available to citizens (Parks, 1957). Political turmoil in the 1970s concerning leaked government documents (the Pentagon Papers in particular) created a lively discussion about citizens’ “right to know” about information that the government collected or created (Ivester, 1977), a controversy that finds new relevance in the era of Wikileaks. Jaeger, Bertot, and Shuler (2010) argue that access to and dissemination of government data are core founding principles in the U.S., and many European countries have similarly found the right of citizens to government data to be fundamental (Gomes and Soares, 2014). The open data movement has seen successes in many countries, including the establishment of data.gov and the associated Open Government Directive promulgated by the Obama administration in the U.S., and Open Data Strategy for Europe (European Commission, 2013), a United Nations Statement on Open Government Data for Citizen Engagement (United Nations, 2013), and many others (Gomes and Soares, 2014; Zuiderwijk and Janssen, 2014a).
The significance of the open data movement for changing the relations between citizens and governments is a major research area (Bertot et al. 2014; Ubaldi, 2013; Zuiderwijk and Janssen, 2014b). However, there is an argument that the e-government portal movement should give way to the open data movement (Robinson et al., 2009), turning control of data organization, presentation, and interpretation over to non-government entities, media, and interested citizens. Proponents argue that open data will lead to greater transparency, and hence to better oversight by citizens (Andersen, 2009; Bertot, Jaeger and Grimes, 2010a), greater civic participation (Francolli, 2011; Wahid, 2012), and more informed collaboration and debate (Ubaldi, 2013). McDermott (2010) outlines transparency, participation, and collaboration as the three hallmarks of open government (cf. Meijer, Curtin, and Hillebrandt, 2012).
A counterargument is that big data is too big and unorganized to be utilized effectively by anyone without significant digital tools and expertise and that big data is easily misinterpreted either intentionally or unintentionally. The most extreme form of this argument is that there is no such thing as “raw data” (Gitelman, 2013) and that all data has gone through some interpretive lens (Davies and Frank, 2013).
Open government and big data initiatives bump up against social media when we consider the possibility of “Social Government,” or government and public services co-designed and co-produced by citizens and government entities (Bertot, Jaeger, and Grimes, 2010; Bertot, Jaeger, and Hanse, 2012; Bertot, Jaeger, Munson, and Glaisyer, 2010; Ferro et al., 2013; Mergel, 2013a; Scherer, Wimmer, and Strykowski, 2015). Attempts at designing social government systems, or at understanding how social government might be facilitated by social media platforms, identify several steps in co-production:
• identifying problems and needs;
• development of ideas;
• design of services for the public;
• implementation and diffusion of public services; and
• monitoring of public services.
Social government analysis recognizes that multiple stakeholders are involved in these steps, and social media can play the role of intermediary in bringing these stakeholders together. In this view, social media can be an enabler of crowdsourced problem solving involving citizens, government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and others (Chun et al., 2010; Doan, Ramakrishnan, and Halevy, 2011). Exploring inter-organizational collaboration using an open social media platform called WeChat that connects government entities, citizens, and university stakeholders, Wang, Medaglia, and Jensen (2016) found that collaboration was characterized by an ad-hoc and non-linear management of time, a sense of shared commitment to the accomplishment of tasks, serendipitous recruitment of team members based on expertise, and a transition from formal/professional to informal/private collaboration. This type of networked, collaborative government is recognized in the public administration literature as “New Public Service” (Brainard and McNutt, 2010), and is considered the most desirable way for government and citizens to interact (Bonsón et al., 2012; Grunig and Grunig, 2008).
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