What is Digital Citizenship?

Perhaps best to start with citizenship and work backwards. First let me layout some academic-speak from an article/paper I have written, The Monitorial Citizen: Towards a Theoretical Model:

“Following a heuristic established by T.H. Marshall (1950) and expanded by Peter Dahlgren (1995, pp. 136-138), John Hartley sees a teleological progression through historical stages of citizenship—from civil citizenship in the 17th century (“enlightenment rationality leading to individual rights and the bourgeois freedoms”), political citizenship in the 18th and 19th centuries (“representative democracy and government by consent expressed in the vote”), and social citizenship in the 20th century (“welfare and education understood as rights”), to cultural citizenship (“or identity, as in ‘identity politics’”) and this new form of DIY citizenship in the late 20th and early 21st century, based on semiotic self-determination (resulting in what he calls “citizens of media”) (pp. 154-188). Citizenship, he argues, is “no longer simply a matter of social contract between state and subject, no longer even a matter of acculturation to the heritage of a given community; DIY citizenship is a choice people make for themselves….there’s an increasing emphasis on self-determination as the foundation of citizenship” (p. 178).

I believe that Hartley is onto something in locating a new mode of citizenship that is closely related to identity and identity politics in an era of rampant consumerism and mass/individualized mediation. I too want to foreground this intimate relationship between the individual (as publicly-privately constituted) and the symbolic material of public life made constantly available via media (Thompson, 1995, p. 212). The above examples of monitorial actions perhaps show how DIY citizenship is partly manifest; how our allegiances and commitments to, our understandings and competencies of politics are hobbled together in piecemeal fashion by our engagement with cultural resources; how we define ourselves as individuals, but also citizens through these monitorial engagements with mediated public life.”

Citizenship, thus, is a complex relationship between citizen, state (political bodies of which the citizen is a member of a polity), nation (as an imagined construct), and world (which we are all members as sentient beings). Given the heuristic above, I see citizenship as something that can be granted, but perhaps more important for our purposes here, something that is also asserted, believed in, imagined, and activated.

Thus, what is Digital Citizenship (DC)? I see it as the numerous means available to citizens for the assertion and constitution of one’s citizenship through digital technologies. Again, give the above, it might be constituted through any of the following actions:

1. Asserting one’s rights to government officials, corporations, or other entities (such as mainstream media) central to the administration of power in a corporate-capitalist democracy.

2. Planning, organizing, mobilizing, and executing strategic initiatives to bring about political change (either within or outside the formal confines of political structures), or assertion of one’s identity and interests, or attempts to affect political outcomes (i.e., elections, policy reform, environmental change, and so on).

3. Contributing social discourse to the public sphere in an attempt to introduce, alter, expand, or contest ideas of a political nature (perhaps a part of the above point, perhaps not).

4. Establishing or asserting one’s identity as a member of a community (or a specific community’s identity within broader communal formations) with the ultimate goal that the identity itself can have an impact within the polity (for instance, a gay person deciding to “out” himself because, among other reasons, he want to stand up and be counted as a gay person with rights).

While such definitions are most certainly riddled with holes, perhaps it is easier to fashion numerous ways in which DC is manifest through various forms of civic and political engagement via digital technologies. Let ye count the ways?

in media res media

Why not start in the middle of things, in the middle of media?

I was having a conversation with a student the other day about traveling. She is headed to Europe for a couple fo weeks she hopes to turn into a couple of months. It's harder to do in some ways today than it was when I was traveling back in the late 80s and early 90s. Money, for one thing, is much more expensive. But in many ways its much easier, of course. Back then few had email, and of course, there were no websites to help us plan, no MySpace to connect with fellow travelers, no lists of pensions or cheap places to crash.

The conversation reminded me of getting off a train in a small German town around dusk. I remember standing in the station with my back to the river, looking over the small square shrouded in light drizzle and wondering where I was going to spend the night. I'd come to Mainz to see the Gutenberg press, but clearly I was going to have to wait until morning. The chalkboards showed all the hotels were full and I was just about resigned to camping down by the river, despite the rain, when teenage boy approached me. He wanted to practice English. I told him I was looking for digs. He put me up in his parents attic and the next morning introduced me to French press coffee. By the time I got back to the States I had determined to go to grad school. Seems the French press and the Gutenberg press have been constants in my life ever since.

Maybe one way to kick this off is to get a little help from you guys. I'm teaching 572T this summer, the grad version of New Media Technologies. So, what do you think these grads need to know? My undergrads in the same class read Jenkins' Conversion Culture. That's been working well to unveil the workings of culture and commerce in new media. I've got a host of books for the grads, but what do you think they -- as potential phd applicants --need to take away?