input from each of the individual authors, and we truly see this book as the result of a collective conversation. We know the friendships will last, and we hope the conversation does, too, with many more contributors.
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Youth Voice, Media, and Political Engagement
Introducing the Core Concepts
Henry Jenkins
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Zombies/Activists/Fans
Fall 2011. An army of people dressed as zombies—many of them from Zombiecon—a New York City horror fan convention—had just disembarked from a big yellow school bus at Washington Square Park, then the home base for Occupy Wall Street. The zombie had emerged as one of many key symbols of the Occupy movement—standing in for “undead corporations” that were sucking the lifeblood of the 99 percent, soulless executives who had lost their humanity in pursuit of capital. Elderly tourists (mostly little old ladies) with cell phone cameras were stopping the zombies to pose for selfies and attempt to better understand their strange costumes, resulting in a series of exchanges that would further spread awareness of the protests. You could see the seniors (not to mention the zombies themselves and other protesters) texting, tweeting, and sending photos or videos. Passing the word was the point; Occupy was less a movement than a provocation (Trope and Swartz 2011). Its goals were primarily discursive; Occupy sought to shift how the American public thought about inequalities of wealth. Occupy’s goals were also spatial: to reclaim public spaces for public purposes. And the little old ladies questioning the zombies were part of the process, spreading the word via each of their social networks.
This is what democracy looks like in the 21st century—yet another shift in the evolving image-bank through which Americans collectively imagine the prospects of social change. The Cultural Front in the 1930s sought to influence the development of popular culture, giving rise to Aaron Copland, Norman Rockwell, Frank Capra, and many others (Denning 1998). The most traditional (and now often banal) images of American democracy draw on symbols that took shape during this period. The protest movements of the 1960s also tried to tap into the languages of popular culture—especially those of rock and comics—to create a counterculture, one which was implicitly and often explicitly critical of corporately owned media. As Fred Turner (2008) and Aaron Delwiche (2013) suggest, our current cyberculture built on the foundations of the 1960s counterculture, giving rise to the rhetoric of digital revolution. The protest movements of the early 1990s embraced a DIY aesthetic, inspired the indie media movement, and employed culture jamming as a way of “blocking the flow” of concentrated media. Adbusters, a key culture jamming organization, begat Occupy, but Occupy pushed beyond their rhetorical practices.
Even painted in such broad strokes, one can see an ongoing process through which young people have refreshed and renewed the public’s symbolic power as they fight for social justice; they often push back against inherited forms and search for new mechanisms for asserting their voice. Occupy, like other recent protest movements, tapped pop culture to express participants’ collective identities and frame their critiques. Thus a more playful style of activism is emerging through this appropriative and transformative dimension of participatory culture. Images and stories from superhero comics or cult television series are not only a shared reference among participants but also will be understood by a larger public. So the activists dressed up, created their own videos, and shared those videos on YouTube, where they were seen by many who were not going to Washington Square, Los Angeles City Hall, or any other Occupation site. These various activities offer examples of what this book is calling participatory politics. Participatory politics might be described as that point where participatory culture meets political and civic participation, where political change is promoted through social and cultural mechanisms rather than through established political institutions, and where citizens see themselves as capable of expressing their political concerns—often through the production and circulation of media. Throughout this book, we will be considering examples of innovative organizations and networks that have deployed mechanisms of participatory practice to help young people enter the political process. And we will identify alternative models for the political process that respond to or suggest a way to move past what some have described as a crisis in American democracy.
By Any Media Necessary seeks to address a core contradiction. On the one hand, there is a widespread perception that: the institutions historically associated with American democracy are dysfunctional, public trust in core institutions is eroding, civic organizations no longer bring us together, elected representatives are more beholden to big contributors than to voters, electoral processes have been rigged to protect incumbents and to disqualify minority and youth participants, periodic government shutdowns and budget crisis reflect a core impasse between the two parties in Washington, the mass media is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a dwindling number of conglomerates, the news we are receiving is sharply biased by those same partisan interests, surveillance invades our privacy and intimidates would-be political participants, and very little is likely to emerge at the level of institutional politics that is going to shift those conditions very much. Whew! On the other hand, we have seen an expansion of the communicative and organizational resources available to everyday people (and grassroots organizations) as we become more and more accustomed to using networked communications toward our collective interests. You will not understand this book unless you see both of these two claims as largely true, with grassroots media being deployed as the tool by which to challenge the failed mechanisms of institutional politics.
In Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age, Manuel Castells (2012) describes a range of political movements from the indignadas in Spain to the “Arab Spring” uprisings to Occupy Wall Street that deployed grassroots expression and networked communication to construct a new political imaginary. Castells writes, “Since the institutional public space, the institutionally designated space for deliberation, is occupied by the interests of the dominant elites and their networks, social movements need to carve out a new public space that is not limited to the Internet, but makes itself visible in the spaces of public life” (10). Castells makes three core claims. First, such spaces create a strong sense of community, forging social bonds and collective identities between participants. Second, such occupied spaces become sites for imagining alternatives, generating new symbols, reconnecting with historical memories, and testing and refining new rhetorics, often in a highly accelerated fashion. And, third, these encampments became “spaces of deliberation,” testing new models for debate, collaboration, and collective decision making. Such sites enable rapid innovation on the level of social formations, personal and collective identities, rhetorics and symbols, and deliberative mechanisms and processes. And networked communication empowers the rapid diffusion of those innovations.1
The American public desperately needs to find ways to make the government work on its behalf, since many of the core issues—such as citizenship rights for undocumented youth or an end to racialized police violence—are questions that involve the relationship between citizens and the state. But many of today’s grassroots organizations believe that the most effective way to put pressure on the government is through the exercise of expressive and discursive power—through education and cultural change—rather than necessarily through the ballot box. In Counter-Democracy, Pierre Rosanvallon (2008) describes the various mechanisms by which citizens in Western democratic countries have sought to hold their governments accountable for working within and preserving the infrastructure of democracy. He argues that new political practices have expanded in response to growing skepticism toward governments and disengagement with institutional forms of politics:
For some time now, political scientists have tried to identify unconventional forms of participation, which may have increased in number as the rate of participation in elections declined. The number of people participating in strikes or demonstrations, signing petitions and expressing collective solidarity in other ways suggests that the age is not one of political apathy and that the notion that people are increasingly withdrawing into the private sphere is not correct. It is better to say that citizenship has changed in nature rather than declined. There has been a simultaneous diversification of the range, forms, and targets of political expression.