This will be a series of blog posts that I am writing to assist me in the work of developing my book. Basically, I want to engage in a critical analysis, as it pertains to my interest in civics and citizenship education, of some of the key scholars in a range of different fields. I will be aiming to describe their arguments, the relevance of those arguments to my work, and any differing points of view related to the work in question.
This section is on Chris Wells’ The Civic Organisation and the Digital Citizen.
Wells, C. (2015). The civic organization and the digital citizen: Communicating engagement in a networked age. Oxford University Press.
This book is a little outside my subject area; it’s more a book about communication theory than about civics and citizenship education. Having said that, I think it’s very appropriate for my own research into civics and citizenship (as that is related to communication, in some respects too). It is also very well structured and written, which makes it easy to engage with.
Wells begins by engaging with the idea that 2011 was some turning point for young people and their engagement with politics and civil society. He’s quite critical of young people’s movements in the early parts of the book, acknowledging that while it does demonstrate young people are engaged (and not apathetic) about politics, and that they are capable of creating powerful and well organised movements, he is scathing about their successes. While he does note that there have been some successes, he says that the failures – in goals, in vision, in achieving stated aims – have by and large field to do so. He notes that the dirty business of everyday democracy is where these innovative protest movements have been inert and inactive.
To work out how this might be the case, he examines the way that there appears to be a chasm of indifference between the institutions that seek to engage with youth, and the places that young people want to be engaged in. The book suggests spaces that could potentially connect young activists with the political structures that they so ambivalently address. In particular, Wells is interested in the communicative relationships between young citizens and the civic organisations in the digital era. In some ways, this is similar to what W. Lance Bennett argues (and Wells does reference Lance Bennett) when he suggested that there is less a failure or deficit in young people’s participation and more of a communication deficit between participatory groups and institutions and the young people who are involved in those groups.
The really interesting part (for me) came in the second chapter, where Wells discusses the shifting foundations of citizenship. His argument here is that we are seeing the emergence fo a network society, which is replacing the older order of social processes, which took place through organisations. The reasons are, as Shirky might argue, related to the increased ease of organising, and the lower costs involved in that organising. There is an unprecedented connectedness across a myriad of spheres, which has led to an increase in transnational activism, amongst other things (but importantly for my research). This has meant that civic identity has become increasingly personalised. While the web, one might imagine, would increase our capacity for identifying with each other at a large scale, Wells suggests that this is not the case, and instead we hav become increasingly parochial about our networks: identity politics, in other words. We are seeking new ways of developing a satisfying self conception, and new forms of association are coming into focus to replace early social groups.
In short, wells argues (again, drawing on Bennett), that there are now two contrasting civic information styles: the older, dutiful style and the younger, actualising style. These styles are contrasted in terms of how they perceive appropriate sources, modes of interacting with information, information interpretation and action outcomes.