economic or political opportunity. It is realized when a young person is able to pursue a personal interest or passion with the support of friends and caring adults, and is in turn able to link this learning and interest to academic achievement, career success or civic engagement. (42)
Young people often take more chances and invest more of themselves in their recreational lives than they do in the school environment, especially given today’s constant pressure to prepare for standardized testing. Such connections, the connected learning researchers conclude, are fluid as young people try out identities and explore interests, drilling deeper into those they find meaningful and moving on to others that look rewarding.
What these young people do for fun may move swiftly into forms of social and political engagement if, say, outside forces threaten the worlds they have built for themselves. For example, Rachel Cody Pfister (2014) shares a case study involving Hogwarts at Ravelry, a community of young knitters who came together as a consequence of their shared interests in all things Harry Potter. Through this community, participants articulated a “shared purpose, culture, identity” that empowered their civic actions. When the group sought to organize the “Ravelympic Games” in parallel with the official 2012 Olympics, they received a threatening letter from the U.S. Olympic Committee. The community used its social network to educate members about the stakes in this conflict, to brainstorm possible responses, to reach appropriate allies, and to shift public opinion. The parallels between the struggles of this crafting community in the Harry Potter fan realm and the kinds of civic activities that drew Lauren Bird to the Harry Potter Alliance should be clear enough; in both instances, fandom provided the conceptual resources, the shared identity, and the sense of collective empowerment required for political participation.
One of the key ways that networked communication has mattered (especially when coupled with the outreach efforts of the kinds of organizations we are studying) is in creating opportunities for youth to enter new kinds of communities and, through them, to open themselves to “consequential connections.” Another case in point is 15-year-old Enzo from Students for Liberty. Enzo attended a California high school where a majority of liberal-leaning students supported President Obama in the 2012 election; he knew of no other students who shared his budding interest in libertarian ideology: “There aren’t really any high school groups per se, and I’m probably the only libertarian at my high school because either everyone is gung ho about Barack Obama because it’s the fad or is just a Republican because their parents are. And so, I don’t really have a group or membership or anything. I’m just kind of there.” What’s more, at 15, he did not have a driver’s license, access to transportation, or the financial means to contact like-minded young people in his community. Instead, Enzo formed friendships with a group of young libertarians he met on Tumblr, using the space to learn more about the movement and to “try on” a new identity that diverged from his parents’ more conservative beliefs. Enzo, whose views on social issues like gay marriage led him to explore libertarianism, said, “There’s the generation gap; like the older generations aren’t as accepting of libertarianism as the newer ones are,” and explained that pursuing his interests online helped him steer around obstacles to participation:
Tumblr is a very good place to find like-minded stuff and discuss, so that’s where I met most of my libertarian friends. That’s where we mostly converse. They have invited me to some places but my parents won’t take me because they can’t afford it or it’s too late or it’s on a weeknight or something like that. It’s kind of hard, so it’s mostly online and stuff like that, and just talking to my friends at school and trying to convert them.
Enzo’s explanation reveals not only the possibilities of participating online but also the concrete limits around civic and political participation for young people, particularly those who have not reached voting age; many potentially meaningful connections are not fully realized because young people need adult support to fully pursue their emerging interests.
Participating in What?
Across this book, our focus is primarily on new and innovative political networks, which are choosing tactics and rhetorics that respond to the popular desire for meaningful participation. We are describing the mechanisms through which participants are struggling to achieve greater equality in their capacity to exert voice and influence within decision-making processes that will determine our collective futures. When critical theory is framed in a language of resistance, readers pretty much know what it is “the people” are resisting—neoliberalism, racism, homophobia, patriarchy, militarism, and so on. When the conversation turns to participation, theorists are forced to think about what is being built, what a more ideal society might look like, and the real-world roadblocks that make it difficult to achieve maximized forms of participation. Again and again, such discussions must return to the core question: Participating in what?
As researchers debate what kinds of spaces offer opportunities for meaningful participation, Carpentier (Jenkins and Carpentier 2013) proposes a productive distinction between “participating in” and “participating through” media. So, for example, while one is free to submit a wide array of videos through YouTube, the governance of that platform is controlled by its corporate owner, Google. No one can claim to be a citizen of YouTube, which is run for profit and not for the collective welfare. Unlike, for example, Hogwarts at Ravelry, the comments section on YouTube is notoriously uncivic, a space known for harsh and hateful posts, often directed by dominant groups against any and all forms of minority expression. Yet one study (Thorson et al. 2013) identifies thousands of videos posted by the Occupy movement on YouTube, videos that often challenged corporate interests and circulated at a range of scales from the hyperlocal to the global. Groups such as those involved in Occupy have forged strong political movements in part as a consequence of the ways they communicate with each other through YouTube, but they have remained at the mercy of the corporate interests that decide how free expression will be limited within this platform.
A distinction similar to the one just described can be drawn between participation within grassroots organizations that advocate for change and participation within the governance of the society. Young people are experimenting within participatory structures within their social and recreational lives, bringing some of those structures to the work they are doing as political agents. But these structures are not necessarily accepted within established political institutions and thus do not always influence public policy. We return to this question of what counts as politics in the book’s conclusion. Some young people are ambivalent about whether some of the projects we will discuss should be understood as political as opposed to purely cultural and educational. We wanted to flag the issue here as it is important to recognize that more work must be done before American democratic structures are going to be as fully and meaningfully participatory as many might desire.
Carpentier (Jenkins and Carpentier 2013) insists that for processes to be truly participatory, there must be equality and reciprocity between participants, a standard not fully met by every organization we discuss, let alone by the commercial platforms they use to pursue their goals. Yet the rhetoric of participation raises expectations about how power should be distributed—expectations that are expressed through struggles over terms of service—but also through the formation of alternative media networks that allow participants greater control over what happens to their materials. And we will see in Chapter 6, some groups opt out of traditional civic practices, such as voting, because they see them as less effective at promoting desired political changes than approaches emphasizing educational outreach and cultural change.
We will be especially interested in the roles organizations and networks play in fostering participatory politics. Young people often describe the language within which Americans conduct institutionalized politics as exclusive (in that you have to already be immersed in the system to understand what’s being said) and repulsive (in that the sharply partisan tone of current discourse turns politics into something that is divisive and disgusting). Ethan Zuckerman (2013b) argues that young people are turning to participatory politics because they see a failure in more traditional civic institutions and practices: “Here’s an ugly, but plausible, explanation for the shifting engagement in civics: It’s not that people aren’t interested in civics. They’re simply not interested in feeling ineffectual or helpless.” By contrast, the groups we study invite participation. They have strong