Chris Wells

Young citizens and civic learning: two paradigms of citizenship in the digital age

How can civic education keep pace with changing political identifications and practices of new generations of citizens? This paper examines research on school-based civic education in different post-industrial democracies with the aim of deriving a set of core learning categories that offer a starting point for thinking about how to address changing citizen identity styles and learning opportunities in various online and offline environments. The preponderance of school-based civic education programs reflects traditional paradigms of dutiful citizenship (DC) oriented to government through parties and voting, with citizens forming attentive publics who follow events in the news. The authors expand upon these conventional learning categories by identifying additional civic learning opportunities that reflect more self-actualizing (AC) styles of civic participation common among recent generations of youth who have been termed digital natives. Their AC learning styles favor interactive, networked activities often communicated through participatory media such as videos shared across online networks. The result is an expanded set of learning categories that recognize the value of different citizenship styles and emerging online environments that may supplement or supplant school civics.

YOUTUBE, TWITTER AND THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT: Connecting content and circulation practices

Videos stored on YouTube served as a valuable set of communicative resources for publics interested in the Occupy movement. This article explores this loosely bound media ecology, focusing on how and what types of video content are shared and circulated across both YouTube and Twitter. Developing a novel data-collection methodology, a population of videos posted to YouTube with Occupy-related metadata or circulated on Twitter alongside Occupy-related keywords during the month of November 2011 was assembled. In addition to harvesting metadata related to view count and video ratings on YouTube and the number of times a video was tweeted, a probability sample of 1100 videos was hand coded, with an emphasis on classifying video genre and type, borrowed sources of content, and production quality. The novelty of the data set and the techniques adapted for analysing it allow one to take an important step beyond cataloging Occupy-related videos to examine whether and how videos are circulated on Twitter. A variety of practices were uncovered that link YouTube and Twitter together, including sharing cell phone footage as eyewitness accounts of protest (and police) activity, digging up news footage or movie clips posted months and sometimes years before the movement began; and the sharing of music videos and other entertainment content in the interest of promoting solidarity or sociability among publics created through shared hashtags. This study demonstrates both the need for, and challenge of, conducting social media research that accommodates data from multiple platforms.

How Trump Drove Coverage to the Nomination: Hybrid Media Campaigning

Writing in summer 2016 about Donald Trump and political communication is a fraught task. One is tempted to proclaim something dramatic: the end of an era, the beginning of one, or some kind of apot...

From Concerned Shopper to Dutiful Citizen: Implications of Individual and Collective Orientations toward Political Consumerism

Young citizens are increasingly seeking fulfillment in expressive modes of political participation, and scholars have begun to examine the implications of this trend for engagement in formal politics. While some argue that expressive practices are “crowding out” participation in more conventional civic activities, others more optimistically contend that they have expanded the political repertoires of young citizens, affording them with more opportunities to be engaged. The authors add clarity to this debate by specifying the conditions under which engagement in one particular form of expressive politics, political consumerism, is associated with conventional participation. An analysis of survey data shows that identification with other political consumers significantly enhances the relationship between political consumerism and traditional political engagement, particularly among younger generations of Americans. The authors argue that engaging in political consumerism alongside others provides an important opportunity for young citizens to develop the civic competencies necessary for engagement in the formal political sphere.

The Power of Television Images in a Social Media Age Linking Biobehavioral and Computational Approaches via the Second Screen

There is considerable controversy surrounding the study of presidential debates, particularly efforts to connect their content and impact. Research has long debated whether the citizenry reacts to what candidates say, how they say it, or simply how they appear. This study uses detailed coding of the first 2012 debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to test the relative influence of the candidates’ verbal persuasiveness and nonverbal features on viewers’ “second screen” behavior—their use of computers, tablets, and mobile phones to enhance or extend the televised viewing experience. To examine these relationships, we merged two datasets: (1) a shot-by-shot content analysis coded for functional, tonal, and visual elements of both candidates’ communication behavior during the debate; and (2) corresponding real-time measures, synched and lagged, of the volume and sentiment of Twitter expression about Obama and Romney. We find the candidates’ facial expressions and physical gestures to be more consistent and robust predictors of the volume and valence of Twitter expression than candidates’ persuasive strategies, verbal utterances, and voice tone during the debate.

CITIZENSHIP AND COMMUNICATION IN ONLINE YOUTH CIVIC ENGAGEMENT PROJECTS

This study analyses 36 online civic engagement websites for youth to understand the civic skills and communication opportunities offered to youth in different online environments. The research design draws on recent theoretical work on citizen identity and the design features of online communities to develop a picture of online engagement projects in two dimensions: the model of citizenship encouraged and the style of communication available to users. Results suggest that the citizenship styles inscribed in sites are correlated with the styles of communication the sites offer. In particular, sites that present more conventional civic skills, such as appealing to government for solutions to problems, tend to heavily control how users use the sites; in contrast, those that present citizenship as a broader, expressive engagement with issues and culture are less inclined to define the terms of users’ interactions. This article discusses the implications of the findings for understanding how online civic projects succeed or fail to connect with young people, the possibility of creating sites that both appeal to young people and offer important civic skills, and directions for future study and practice.

Combining Big Data and Survey Techniques to Model Effects of Political Content Flows in Facebook

This article introduces a novel method that combines a “big data” measurement of the content of individuals’ Facebook (FB) news feeds with traditional survey measures to explore the antecedents and effects of exposure to news and politics content on the site. Drawing on recent theoretical and methodological advances, we demonstrate how such a hybrid approach can be used to (a) untangle distinct channels of public affairs content within respondents’ FB news feeds, (b) explore why respondents vary in the extent to which they encounter public affairs content on the site, and (c) examine whether the amount and type of public affairs content flows in one’s FB is associated with political knowledge and participation above and beyond self-report measures of news media use.

Communication, Consumers, and Citizens Revisiting the Politics of Consumption

The year 2011 was defined by the intersection of politics and economics: the Wisconsin protests, the Occupy Movement, anti-austerity demonstrations, the Buffett Rule, and so on. These events drew attention to the role of politics in the erosion of labor power, the rise of inequality, and the excesses of overconsumption. Moving beyond periodic and dutiful action directed at an increasingly unresponsive government, citizens tested the boundaries of what we consider civic engagement by embracing personalized forms of “lifestyle politics” enacted in everyday life and often directed at the market. These issues are the focus of this volume, which we divide into four sections. The first section attempts both to situate consumption in politics as a contemporary phenomenon and to view it through a wider historical lens. The second section advances the notion of sustainable citizenship at the individual/group level and the societal/institutional level, and understands consumption as socially situated and structured. Extending this thinking, the third section explores various forms of conscious consumption and relates them to emerging modes of activism and engagement. The fourth section questions assumptions about the effectiveness of the citizen-consumer and the underlying value of political consumerism and conscious consumption. We conclude by distilling six core themes from this collection for future work.

Participation in the Youth Civic Web: Assessing User Activity Levels in Web Sites Presenting Two Civic Styles

ABSTRACT Concerns over youth disengagement from conventional politics mixed with perceptions of youth aptitude for digital media have led scholars and practitioners to investigate civic Web sites as locations of potential youth learning and participation. Over the past few years, the scholarly literature on youth civic Web sites has developed a number of conceptual vocabularies for, and catalogued the nature of, the civic engagement opportunities offered by such sites. But the extant literature lacks documentation of a critically important step in this research logic: the extent to which young users actually take advantage of the opportunities to offered them. This study addresses this gap by presenting a theoretically driven investigation of specific participatory features in the youth civic Web and the quantity of user contributions they attract. Drawing from untested assumptions found in recent work, we test hypotheses concerning the impact on user activity of (a) citizenship orientations communicated by sites and (b) the organizational background of sites. We find that how sites communicate citizenship plays a significant role in determining the quantity of user participation, while the type of organization sponsoring a site makes little difference. We also document the existence of certain “superstar” sites that attract disproportionate amounts of user content. Directions for future research and methodological issues related to the coding of diverse activity on complex sites and challenges to causal inference are also discussed.

Attention and amplification in the hybrid media system: The composition and activity of Donald Trump’s Twitter following during the 2016 presidential election:

Building on studies of the hybrid media system and attention economy, we develop the concept of amplification to explore how the activities of social media–based publics may enlarge the attention paid to a given person or message. We apply the concept to the 2016 US election, asking who constituted Donald Trump’s enormous Twitter following and how that following contributed to his success at attracting attention, including from the mainstream press. Using spectral clustering based on social network similarity, we identify key publics that constituted Trump’s Twitter following and demonstrate how particular publics amplified his social media presence in different ways. Our discussion raises questions about how algorithms “read” metrics to guide content on social media platforms, how journalists draw on social media metrics in their determinations of news value and worthiness, and how the process of amplification relates to possibilities of citizen action through digital communication.