From Voice to Influence

Understanding Citizenship in a Digital Age

Danielle Allen, Jennifer S. Light, Danielle Allen, Jennifer S. Light

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226262437
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

How have online protests—like the recent outrage over the Komen Foundation's decision to defund Planned Parenthood—changed the nature of political action? How do Facebook and other popular social media platforms shape the conversation around current political issues? The ways in which we gather information about current events and communicate it with others have been transformed by the rapid rise of digital media. The political is no longer confined to the institutional and electoral arenas, and that has profound implications for how we understand citizenship and political participation.With From Voice to Influence, Danielle Allen and Jennifer S. Light have brought together a stellar group of political and social theorists, social scientists, and media analysts to explore this transformation. Threading through the contributions is the notion of egalitarian participatory democracy, and among the topics discussed are immigration rights activism, the participatory potential of hip hop culture, and the porous boundary between public and private space on social media. The opportunities presented for political efficacy through digital media to people who otherwise might not be easily heard also raise a host of questions about how to define "good participation: " Does the ease with which one can now participate in online petitions or conversations about current events seduce some away from serious civic activities into "slacktivism?"Drawing on a diverse body of theory, from Hannah Arendt to Anthony Appiah, From Voice to Influence offers a range of distinctive visions for a political ethics to guide citizens in a digitally connected world.

Part I

Toward Participatory Politics

How are civic relationships changing against the backdrop of networked digital communication? How do novel expressive possibilities intersect with shifts in political identities and even in the very definition of politics? To begin to answer those questions, one must start with historical perspectives. In chapter 1, “Putting Our Conversation in Context,” Jennifer S. Light takes us through a century and-a-half of youth civic and political engagement. She looks at junior republics and unions of newsboys, at ham radio operators and college students. Many of the examples she presents show us young people engaging in communication and action that directly intersects with the decision-making practices of political institutions. Lurking beneath the historical tale is a set of implicit questions about how to analyze the political relevance of the communicative work of people, in particular youth, who are at best marginally connected to political institutions. The empirical evidence presented makes clear the need to rework the concept of political participation, particularly in the contemporary world, as new media-enabled change brings to the fore the political significance of communication.

In chapter 2, “Youth, New Media, and the Rise of Participatory Politics,” Joseph Kahne, Ellen Middaugh, and Danielle Allen provide an argument for how to think about the political relevance of communicative activity that occurs outside formal political institutions and how, using that framework, to bring into the present the account of how young people find ways to express themselves politically. Building on scholars, like Henry Jenkins, who argue that new media have made youth culture far more “participatory,” they argue that a transfer of “participatory” styles from youth’s cultural engagement to their political engagement is underway. They note an increasing prominence of “participatory politics” among youth of all demographic backgrounds. By finding ways to explain the links between expressive cultural practices and politics, this chapter launches one of the book’s central projects: the achievement of a revised approach to the concept of political participation generally, and not merely for youth.

1

Putting Our Conversation in Context

Youth, Old Media, and Political Participation, 1800–1971

Jennifer S. Light

In this book, twenty-first-century media supply the context for an account of evolving civic relationships. To understand the link between the shifting technological landscape and evolving political identities, there is no better place to begin than with a consideration of youth experience. The impact of new technologies is often strongest for the youngest generation. Young people also are open to flexible conceptions of participation because they do not yet have settled habits and, in many cases, may be deliberately excluded from traditional pathways to politics—such as voting—because of their age.

Many accounts of new media and politics highlight youth practices, suggesting that individuals and groups previously excluded from formal political structures are able to express their voices and exert influence as never before.1 This chapter tempers that view. I sketch a history of youth political participation in the United States since 1800, focusing on the activities of populations under age twenty-one in a period when all were by definition nonvoting citizens—between 1800 and 1971, when the voting age in federal elections was lowered from twenty-one to eighteen.2 The evidence presented here documents how the history of youth, media, and political participation is remarkably rich terrain. Young people have long found ways to share political ideas among themselves and with adults, and media have played a role in these activities for two centuries.

My purpose is broader than merely telling readers “It’s not all new,” however. In keeping with this book’s ambition to use the youth experience as a heuristic device for thinking about relationships between technology and politics more broadly, this chapter considers the history of youth political participation in the context of the history of alternative media. In particular, it spotlights how new media used—but not controlled—by youth have typically provided only temporary access to the public sphere for political and cultural expression before adult gatekeepers foreclosed these opportunities. Taking the long view helps us to see how the contemporary youth practices attracting so much attention are contingent. History thus offers not only a context but also a usable past, expanding the kinds of theoretical frameworks that can be brought to bear on normative analyses of the relationship between technology and politics in the digital age.

The Nineteenth Century: The Age of Scattered Activism

The nineteenth century witnessed numerous examples of youth participation in political activities. From privileged students at elite universities to working-class immigrants, young people across the nation engaged in this work. These diverse actors shared an approach to political action that largely took place outside of organized pressure groups or associations.

Schools were a rich space for social action. Scholars have identified numerous examples of ad hoc protests by college students about local campus issues from dining options to teaching staff.3 Occasionally the students expressed opinions about broader political issues; for example, antislavery and antidraft activities could be found on campuses around the Civil War.4 The late nineteenth century also marked the beginnings of widespread interest in student government at colleges and high schools. Youth congresses were established at many institutions, patterned after the American political system, to give children practical training.5

Only a small fraction of America’s young people received sustained education in the ninetheenth century, however. Parents depended on their children’s earnings to make ends meet. As a result, the labor arena became another important site for young people’s action. Like their adult counterparts, child workers, including newsboys, bootblacks, messengers, miners and factory machine operators, demanded better working conditions and better pay.6

The forces that propelled children into jobs as newsboys and factory workers similarly facilitated their entry into civil service activities, especially in police departments and fire companies. These were “pseudo–civil service” jobs; in many cities at this time police and fire services were in the private sector or were in some cases unpaid volunteer work.7 Before the Civil War, for example, many volunteer fire companies depended on the participation of boys as young as ten.8 Police and detective agencies regularly hired boys and girls to trail suspects or to catch an unsuspecting criminal “in the act.”9 Elsewhere, children played these pseudo–civil service roles even more informally—for example, helping police and judges to enforce laws and solve crimes, or working as poll watchers for elections in which they could not vote.10 In 1895, children affiliated with the Hebrew Institute on New York City’s east side mobilized to establish a juvenile street cleaning brigade—at first independent of the city, but later backed by the city’s public street cleaning department and inspiring similar organizations in other municipalities. The children called on the mayor to urge him to regulate pushcarts more stringently to improve the cleanliness of city streets.11

Outside of schools and work, children found other opportunities to voice their ideas. Young men’s voluntary associations in many cities and towns, some affiliated with religious organizations, brought together teenagers and young men—most from the middle classes—to discuss the day’s political issues.12 Street “gangs,” generally populated by a working-class or immigrant membership that included not only teenagers but also kids as young as eight, were important sources of informal political organization for young men and boys.13 They routinely participated in political activities—for example, anti-abolitionist riots in New York City in the 1830s, or in subsequent decades assisting local officials with everyday tasks. And in July 1863, when workers in New York City protested a new draft law with three days of civil disturbances that destroyed public buildings and homes, “of the 261 rioters arrested for whom information on age exists, 27 percent were between the ages of seven and twenty years old.”14

With the full suite of citizenship rights extended only to white males, the girls and nonwhites who would not grow up to be equal citizens nonetheless made their mark in the political arena. As early as the 1830s, for example, northern African American youth participated in abolitionist activities, from raising money to sponsoring rallies and lecturers.15 Literary societies for young African American men offered opportunities to organize around suffrage.16 Teenage girls were prominent union organizers, sometimes even leading strikes.17 Later in the century the settlement movement, which organized services for immigrants in US cities, hired mostly female college students and graduates to their staffs. These settlement residents “helped to change what citizens in many cities expected of government.”18 Suffragettes also drew many from the younger generation.19

How Did Media Figure in This History?

Print journalism was the primary medium in this period, and young people proved to be eager journalists and publishers. Some were regular contributors to adult media. These included the midcentury “factory girl” publications published by child and young adult workers, which, in addition to offering poems and stories, attested to the tough working conditions in factories and mills. They also included more mainstream adult newspapers such as the Jewish Daily Forward, which hired teenager Pauline Newman for occasional reporting on labor issues over several years.20 Young men’s voluntary associations, which brought together teenagers with young men in their twenties, regularly published literary and political magazines.21 Although colleges and high schools during this period did supply some opportunities for young writers, most student publications were literary in focus, and did not prioritize coverage or analysis of political matters.22

Still other entrepreneurial youth set out to create their own publishing houses. At first, most scavenged materials to build letterpresses, but with the release at midcentury of the novelty toy press—a printing press that was cheap and easy to use—came a boom in adolescent media. To find audiences and boost circulation, young people banded together in amateur press associations, which sprang up in cities from Milwaukee to New York. In Chicago, for example, forty-two juvenile newspapers were circulating in 1876.23 State and regional associations of amateur publishers—and eventually a national body—were created by these teens as networks to widen the exchange of their work.24 These papers joined literary content (indeed there were regular literary contests) with editorials on the period’s political questions, including abolition, equal pay for equal work, and female education and suffrage. Meetings of the National Amateur Press Association themselves became forums for political controversy around issues of membership; girls would be denied full status in the organization, but after some debate African American boys were accepted on equal grounds with whites.25 The girls eventually established a Ladies’ Amateur Press Association, and Paula Petrik (1989, 1992) has suggested that suffrage debates a generation later directly benefited from this work.26 A change in postal laws in the 1870s, however, which raised rates for amateur publishers, led to a drop-off in circulation as many young people found the cost of sending out their periodicals to be prohibitively high.27

1900–1930: The Age of Adult Supervision

The first three decades of the twentieth century marked an important shift in expert and popular thinking about childhood and adolescence, with implications for young people’s political participation. Based in large part on accepted practices among the middle and upper classes, and in turn on the work of psychologist and child study movement leader G. Stanley Hall, a rising tide of public opinion came to conceive of youth—at least for white Americans—as a “separate sphere.”28 The implication for families of all stations on the economic ladder was that young people should ideally have a “sheltered childhood,” removed from the world of work and instead defined by prolonged schooling and dependency. Adults established a multiplicity of new organizations—for example, the Boy Scouts and Campfire Girls—to supervise boys and girls as they moved through this life stage.29 (Concern about boys was especially intense, as is detailed in MacLeod 1983 and Kett 1977.)30 Simultaneously, they agitated on a range of children’s issues, from labor to education, to help make the sheltered childhood a reality for greater numbers of kids.31

In this context of new values, adults imagined children’s political participation to be limited to experiences in supervised training for citizenship tomorrow, ideally confined to separate spaces for young people. Schools were first among them. Classroom politics in student governments expanded their reach, with special emphasis on the School Cities and School Republics that modeled themselves after the American republic at state and local levels.32 (School-based branches of the Model League of Nations, precursor to the Model United Nations, appeared in the mid-1920s.)

After school and during vacation periods, many of the Progressive-era institutions that organized children’s activities—from playgrounds to settlement houses to clubs and summer camps—offered a similar political education with junior republics, boy cities, and other mock governments. The myriad “junior citizens” in this period generally limited their activities to children’s spaces, although there were important exceptions. In 1914, for example, Milwaukee’s Boy Scouts and Newsboys’ Republic participated in a public health campaign focused on eliminating the conditions that brought disease-carrying insects to their neighborhoods; they and other children became “junior inspectors.”33 And Junior Chautauqua “Junior Town” service projects in the 1920s focused on community improvement—for example, securing new public playgrounds or public swimming pools.34

A few local governments took the lead to find ways for children to play a greater role in civic activities. Public agencies in several cities (as well as private bodies including the Anti-Cigarette League, theaters, and local protective associations) hired youth for temporary paid work on specific cases.35 More often, however, the children’s civic participation was tied to voluntary programs. Junior Police (for example, in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and Portland, Oregon) and Junior Juvenile Courts (for example, in Cleveland and Saint Louis), where both boys and girls assisted their adult counterparts, were popular in this period as approaches to recruiting youth gangs into activities under adult supervision.36 Most had no actual legal authority, but the court of the Milwaukee Newsboys’ Republic, administered by the city’s Street Trades Division, had powers to enforce the law regulating who could sell newspapers, where, when, and how—and included a court of child judges that adjudicated offenses, hearing 7,500 cases between 1912 and 1923. In the 1910s and 1920s, William George, whose George Junior Republic (established in 1895) had created a space for children to practice politics on the model of the larger American republic, now promoted Junior Municipalities, in which—following a municipal election using the same voting machines as adults—the junior mayor, junior councilors, junior public works officials, and the like assisted their adult counterparts on local community matters.37 Ithaca, New York, had the first such junior municipality (established in 1913).

The outbreak of World War I saw the new norms discouraging child labor relaxed, bringing many tee...