This week, at the symposium “Digitally Connected: Towards a Global Community of Knowledge and Practice around Children, Youth, and Digital Media” organized by the Berkman Center and UNICEF, I will be part of a round table on “Participation and Civic Engagement.” Together with Tim Davies, Gameli Adzaho, and other participants, we will have a conversation on the challenges and opportunities that digital tools and networks offer to youth in terms of political and civic participation. Besides discussing issues of digital inequalities, literacies, and opportunity structures, we will address questions related to the role that researchers, governmental institutions, local communities, and mentors can play for supporting youth participation in civic life.
One of the promises of the digital age is that as children and youth grow up in an interconnected media environment, increasingly using digital tools and networks for creating, circulating, searching and consuming content, they are participating more. Youths, especially the ones who have access to technology and Internet connectivity, are in fact enthusiast users of mobile devices and computers, and invest considerably time communicating and socializing with peers; creating and sharing multimodal content; seeking information online with search engines; and consuming entertainment through web platforms (e.g. videos, games, music). However, since participation is plural and happens across different social realms (e.g. culture, politics, civics, art, geography) it is important to clarify the domain where participation is happening. We might ask, participating in what? For instance, as several quantitative and qualitative studies have shown, most of youth digitally mediated participation is driven by friendship and personal interests, and does not necessarily involve actions that address political concern or that foster community development. Participating in civics and politics is not the same as participating in popular culture circulation nor in peer culture sociability, even though there is an enormous potential to build bridges between them. Helping local/global communities, cultivating solidarity, becoming aware of real world problems, or taking part of a political process, are activities that require a level of agency, power, and opportunity that goes beyond technology access.
In order to understand and foster civic engagement we need to think about access in a more complex and ecological way that also includes access to social, human, geographic, and cultural resources. That is, we need to critically think about the conditions of participation, the opportunity structures and the ecosystems of support that children and youth have in both online platforms (e.g. Facebook, YouTube, Flicker, MORPGs) and offline worlds (e.g. home, family, work, school, community, cities). Participation, at its core, is about power and agency, and when we examine it, it is necessary to consider power differentials in terms of social class, age, gender, and ethnicity because they affect both offline and online worlds and constrain opportunity. Not all youth and children have access to the same social, cultural, human, and technology resources. When thinking about participation and civic engagement, we might ask, What are the resources youth have access in order to participate? Who offers those resources and under what conditions? Who decides the goals of their participation?
The roundtable went pretty well and we had a great discussion. There are public notes of our discussion that can be accessed in this hackpad.
