governance and the public’s expanded expressive capacity. Melissa Brough and Sangita Shresthova (2012) explain this point of view:
Over the last several decades, younger generations in particular have become civically and politically engaged in new and different ways, related less to electoral politics or government or civic organizations and more to personal interests, social networks, and cultural or commodity activism (a form of protest that is typically levied against private companies rather than governments). These modes of political participation are often enacted through informal, noninstitutionalized, nonhierarchical networks in and around the Internet (Bennett 2008[b]; Ito et al. 2009; Jenkins et al. 2006; Kahne, [Lee, and Feezell] 2011). They are political insofar as they aim to influence or change existing power relations.
Many American youth are making calculated choices that they may be more effective at bringing about change through educational or cultural mechanisms than through electoral or institutional means and through a consensus rather than partisan approach—addressing social problems on levels where voluntary actions can make a difference. Such a response is not irrational. Over the last two presidential cycles, there have been dramatic increases in voting by youth, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, American Muslims, and a range of other groups, which is often cited as a key factor in Obama’s victories. However, these shifts in political engagement have not translated into much congressional action on behalf of the issues that matter most to these constituencies. What progress has been made has occurred through executive decree, court decisions, or shifting public attitudes.
W. Lance Bennett (2008a) talks about some of these shifts in terms of “the empowerment of youth as expressive individuals” (2). Here, though, we want to stress their collective—rather than individual—dimensions. As Castells (2012) suggests, political change is being forged through social and political networks that come together online and in physical space to explore new possibilities. We discuss those shifts from a perspective of cautious optimism. We want to document these new cultural mechanisms for political change: how they are working in practice for particular youth involved within specific organizations and how these practices may be forcing us to rethink what “counts” as politics. While we are skeptical of change occurring in the short term through the mechanisms of institutional politics, we are intrigued by political, social, and cultural changes occurring around the edges of the dominant institutions, as young people work together to address issues that matter to them.
Mainstream journalism has tended to dismiss these new kinds of tactics as “clicktivism,” but the central thesis of this book is that there is something bigger going on here that cannot be described in relation to a single platform. These young people are seeking to change the world through any media necessary. For Occupy, for instance, this meant connecting their struggle to everything from V for Vendetta (Guy Fawkes masks) to Sesame Street (“99 percent of the world’s cookies go to 1 percent of the monsters”) and translating those messages into “memes,” documentary videos, public projections, street theater, and body art, among many other media practices. But the highly visible activities of Occupy are simply the tip of the iceberg, reflecting a much broader array of youth-driven movements actively promoting political change.
Meme from Occupy Wall Street movement.
We do not mean to imply that all young people are a uniform group of so-called digital natives, equally comfortable with the possibilities of using networked communications to spread their messages. We share the concerns danah boyd (2012) raises when she writes that the Kony 2012 campaign illustrates inequalities in the current communication context: “The fact that privileged folks—including white American youth—can spread messages like this is wonderful, but my hunch is that they’re structurally positioned to spread information farther and wider than those who are socially marginalized.” Such systemic and structural inequalities remain a real limit to this emerging style of politics, even as new media tactics are also deployed by American Muslims or undocumented immigrants, youth who are more “socially marginalized.” In our work, we’ve discovered young activists who have overcome enormous difficulties in gaining access to the means of cultural production and circulation: from bloggers who did not own their own computers to filmmakers who did not own their own cameras and who relied on community centers and public libraries for digital access. Some groups have easy access to the skills, knowledge, resources, and social connections that enable them to exert their voice into public affairs in a way that is meaningful and effective. Others—especially many of those economically deprived, socially marginalized, historically disempowered—do not.
Who We Are
In 2009 the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation established the multidisciplinary Youth and Participatory Politics (YPP) Research Network, focused on better understanding these issues. This YPP network, led by Joseph Kahne (Mills College), was part of the foundation’s digital media and learning initiatives, which have resulted in a wide array of white papers, reports, and book-length publications—as well as an international conference, launched in 2010, which annually attracts more than 1,200 participants. The YPP network’s efforts includes a large-scale quantitative survey, conducted by Joseph Kahne and Cathy J. Cohen, documenting the political lives of American youth with a strong emphasis on the quantity, quality, and equality of their new media practices, as well as more qualitative efforts to understand different forms of political participation. Network participants also include Danielle Allen (who has edited a collection of essays reexamining the ways the internet has impacted classic understandings of publics and counterpublics), Howard Gardner (whose Good Participation project has been interviewing young people who are involved in traditional political organizations and volunteer service organizations), Jennifer Earl (who has been documenting new forms of protests and online petitions), Lissa Soep (who has been exploring the platforms and practices that might help young people become more involved in participatory politics), Elyse Eidman-Aadahl (who has been engaging educators as they think through new forms of civics and writing instruction that may help young people discover their political voice), and Ethan Zuckerman (who has been developing case studies exploring best practices drawn from social movements from around the world).
A subset of this larger research network, the Media, Activism, and Participatory Politics (MAPP) research team at the University of Southern California, has developed case studies of innovative networks and organizations that have deployed participatory politics to get young people involved in efforts to heighten public awareness and promote social change. Altogether, we’ve interviewed several hundred young activists drawn from the following efforts:
Invisible Children (IC), an organization founded in 2005 and dedicated to ending the human rights violations perpetrated by warlord Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army. IC stumbled into the global limelight when they released Kony 2012, a 30-minute film that broke YouTube’s viewership records.
The Harry Potter Alliance, a nonprofit organization also established in 2005, which encourages civic and political engagement by using metaphors from J. K. Rowling’s best-selling fantasy series. The name Imagine Better is used for HPA’s efforts to expand its outreach to engage with a range of other fan communities, including those around The Hunger Games and Superman. HPA exists in a loose affiliation with Nerdfighters, a YouTube community that initially formed through videos exchanged between vlogging brothers Hank and John Green.
The youth networks connected to the Muslim Public Affairs Council and Muslim Youth Group based at the Islamic Center of Southern California, which engage American Muslim identities by encouraging expression and community-focused civic identity formation in a post-9/11 climate.
The network-based, undocumented youth commonly referred to as DREAMers who engage in immigrant rights organizing and activism to achieve legislative reform.
Students for Liberty (SFL), a group based in libertarian economic and social theories that has recently advocated for an expansion of “second-wave libertarianism.”
Research for this book was conducted over a period of six years and included interviews, participant observation, and media content analysis. Our selection of the cases referenced above