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• 1 media/Los_Angeles_0740.JPG media/Los_Angeles_0740.JPG media/Los_Angeles_0740.JPG 2013-06-01T11:02:22-07:00 By Any Media Necessary: Mapping Youth and Participatory Politics 29 split 2013-12-02T10:15:39-08:00
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  Over the past few decades, we’ve seen dramatic increases in grassroots access to the means of cultural production and circulation and improvements to the infrastructure required for collective action (Jenkins, Ford, and Green, 2013). This participatory turn in culture has been mirrored by shifts in the ways citizens are collectively and individually exerting power within the political process. Young men and women who learned how to use their cameras recording skateboarding videos, to mashup images to make cute cat pictures, to edit making fan videos, are now turning their skills towards political speech and grassroots mobilization. These “creative activists”  are often speaking to each other through images borrowed from commercial entertainment but remixed to communicate their own messages; they are often deploying social media tools and platforms, sometimes in ways that challenge corporate interests; and they are forging communities through acts of media circulation. The conclusion of Henry Jenkins’s 2006 book, Convergence Culture, proposed that a networked society would soon be applying what they learned through play within participatory culture towards more purposeful realms, such as education, religion, and politics. The "By Any Media Necessary" book explores new forms of political activities and identities that have emerged from the practices of participatory culture and are impacting how American youth think of their civic identities.

  In a white paper for the MacArthur Youth and Participatory Politics research network, Cathy J. Cohen and Joseph Kahne (2012) define participatory politics as “interactive, peer-based acts through which individuals and groups seek to exert both voice and influence on issues of public concern.”(vi) Citing data from a survey of more than 4000 respondents aged 15-25, Cohen and Kahne found that those who engaged in participatory politics (roughly 40-45 percent across all racial categories) were almost twice as likely to vote as those who did not. In some cases, youth’s first political exposure might come from a video (such as Kony 2012) forwarded by their friends or classmates. According to the MacArthur survey, 58 percent of American youth forward links or share information through social networks at least once a week. Critics often dismiss such efforts to deploy social media for public awareness campaigns as “slacktivism”; online campaigns are often seen as involving limited risk or effort and having limited impact on institutional politics. Such critiques are part of a larger narrative about the decline of civic participation.  While such critiques raise valid concerns, they also simplify our understanding of the political life of American youth in an era of networked communications.

  Building on (and contributing to) this concept of participatory politics, our team, based at the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California, has been tracking a range of different organizations and networks that have been effective at getting young people involved in civic and political activities through their deft use of networked political practices and participatory culture frameworks.

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• 1 2013-08-05T11:47:02-07:00 “It’s Called ‘Giving a Shit!’” 14 Who Gets to Decide What Constitutes Politics? structured_gallery 2014-11-17T22:43:12-08:00 A panel on participatory politics, hosted by the Futures of Entertainment conference at MIT in November, 2012, brought together representatives from several of our case study organizations. But, when asked if they identified as activists, each participant distanced themselves from this category. Bassam Tariq of the 30 Mosques project thought it was “awful” that political categories were imposed upon Muslim cultural, social, and religious practices; his project hoped to “stay away” from politics in order to focus on “universals,” things everyone can “relate to,” and ideas which are “more open-ended” rather than “imposing an agenda.” Dorian Electra, whose music videos have been widely embraced by Students for Liberty, argued that “being too politicized” might distract from the educational and entertainment value of her work. The Harry Potter Alliance’s Lauren Bird acknowledged that her group, while nonprofit and thus nonpartisan, was involved in a range of political issues, but she stressed that members might have widely divergent perspectives and that ultimately the group was “more on the side of human rights” rather than a particular political “ideology.” Meanwhile, the audience, mostly representing a slightly older generation, were expressing, via Twitter, their dissatisfaction with what they characterized as a “blacklash” against activism or a denial of the political stakes of these young people’s public expression. One audience member summed up the collective response, “On the semantics front, It’s not called ‘activism.’ It’s called ‘giving a shit.’” By Any Media Necessary has made the case that what we are calling “participatory politics” constitutes a legitimate and valuable contribution to public culture. Peter Dahlgren has discussed political participation in terms of Trajectories, Modalities, Motivation, Sociality, and Visibility -­-­ and we will be using these concepts in this closing section to summarize some of the key insights we’ve developed through this book’s multiple case studies. Under Trajectories, we will explore the interplay we’ve discussed between audiences and publics, between popular culture, civil society, and institutional politics. We focus on the process by which young people enter into the political realm and acquire knowledge they will need to act meaningfully in civic life. Under modalities, we consider the ways that these groups produce and share content across a range of different media platforms and social locations, from the hyperlocal (their schools) to the transnational (NGOs and human rights organizations). In terms of motivation, we explore the models of personal and social change informing these movements, including what we’ve discussed here as content worlds and mobilizing structures. In terms of sociality, we will discuss the ways political participation fits within young people’s social and cultural lives, becomes part of what they talk about when they are together and part of what solidifies their involvement in interest-based and friendship-based networks. And in terms of visibility, we will discuss the ways their tactics accelerate the circulation of information through diverse publics and the ways that such pushes to shift public attention may also place these precarious publics at greater risk.
  Media Referenced in Chapter 7