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?
2 comments:
In the interests of imperfection….I’ll go ‘bloggy style’
I appreciate all the thinking that has gone into this construction. I think Jeff has done an effective job of mapping the continents of exploration, but do the coastlines look a little familiar?
I’m interested in at least 2 questions: 1) What does it mean to be engaged in/immersed in/affected by digital citizenship? And 2) How do the modes, moods and mechanisms of digital citizenship affect our scholarship, our students and us?
To that point, I’m not sure if the project is to merely plug a few holes in this theorization and then get on with counting the ways people use digital media for political purposes. This historical perspective risks arguing that the present moment is merely an extension of the past, simply the latest manifestation of a political and media trajectory. I think:
1. We should be wary of frameworks – political and pedagogical -- that rely on the gathering, control and dissemination of information. Rather, I think we should be looking for models for our own engagement with the producers/users/interactors in digital media. We need to think more about inviting them in to explain themselves to us, then try to blur the boundaries between ‘them’ and ‘us.’
2. The approach runs the risk of homogenizing efforts at DC. We know that email campaigns for Darfur – gathering millions of signatures – have little effect, in part because of the perceived (lack of) commitment behind the effort. A single “Baracky” video can have more impact because it appears to have taken time and effort. Effort, expertise, intention, connection may be the key metrics to consider.
3. For the group that is most effective at exploiting the new media – the same cohort that is exploding the ranks of registered voters and thus drastically altering traditional electoral politics in ways we barely comprehend – the Web’s most powerful allure is as a mechanism of self-definition. To this extent, I think your points 3 and 4 come closest to starting us in the right direction. Participation in multiple, interlinked groups, no matter how ephemeral, creates the potential for rapid politicization without historical or future commitment. Barack may be visionary who understands disaggregated politics or he may be a fashion accessory.
Let me wrap by returning to your theorization. I think I’ve understood DIY and monitorial citizenship at opposite poles of participation – you seem to conflate them (at least ‘partly’) here. The DIY movement (if that isn’t an oxymoron) is about creation, sharing, reputation, and thrift. My understanding of monitorial citizenship is about surveillance, reaction, selection and personal efficiency. So, I would appreciate a little more enlightenment on those terms.
Great start to this conversation and some very complex conceptualizations of "digital citizenship" being bandied about. I agree with both of you that digital participations can produce temporary alliances as well as networked connections across multiple interlinked groups that are not necessarily defined according to partisan politics or ideology and that this has the potential to lead to rapid political mobilization without any prior or future commitment.... for those with access -- and according to the 2005 Pew Online Life Report on African Americans and the internet, only 36% of black American families are currently online. Moreover, Pew findings suggest that households with median incomes under $30,000 are three times less likely to be online than households with incomes over $75,000 -- and the DIY where-with-all to mobilize temporary alliances around particular issues (or does this kind of participation emerge organically by google-directed zeitgeist?)
My point, which I think we are all likely in agreement on, is that digital tools do not produce digital citizens, they merely provide possibilities for new modes of engagement that still need actualization (which is harder for those who are resource-poor in a DIY era than ever before).
I absolutely believe that any sort of Center for Digital Citizenship should be studying citizenship practices as they are being articulated, redefined, worked-through in digital spaces, but I would also like to see us engage in project-based initiatives designed to provide training and resources so that many more individualized citizebs can find one another and form temporary alliances around discrete concerns.
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