Civic Engagement
From NMC-Campus
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The Symposium on the Impact of Digital Media is actually part of a series of events taking place simultaneously all over the Internet and involving participants from dozens of countries. These participants include some of the world’s leading scholars on the topics of identity, credibility, and civic engagement, as well as hands-on users of digital media of all ages who are residents of Second Life, as well as a community of practitioners in more than 200 leading universities and museums across the world.
The scholar group is currently engaged in a set of high-level scholarly online dialogs on our three topics — identity, credibility, and civic engagement — taking place now in a Google Group. The second group, all residents of Second Life, are talking part in this 12-day symposium. The third group, mainstream NMC members, will participate in an NMC online conference taking place on the “flat-web” at the end of this month.
All three events are devoted to the same topics, which are informed by the NMC’s work with the MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning, a two-year project in which the NMC is helping to explore the impact of digital media on our lives in a variety of ways, and encouraging dialog among experts, visionaries, and thought leaders from around the globe.
This unique symposium brings that dialog to the current residents of Second Life. We are most interested in your perspectives, and encourage you to add your voices to this mix by adding your thoughts about the impact of digital media on Civic Engagement under each of the following questions in the space below.
[edit] Civic Engagement Question One
To what extent should we be concerned that young people are less inclined than earlier generations to engage with former touchstones of citizenship such as voting and following news about public affairs?
- Is this true? If so, I am not seeing it.
- I've two teenage daughters. They are quite engaged with these issues. They both attend a public school where current events are used in the curriculum; I'm sure that helps. Plus, it's not smooth sailing in politics, foreign affairs, etc. these days! They're bombarded with information every day. They don't have to seek it out - they have to choose to tune it out.
- Why not ask about Americans' propensity to live a disengaged life. For me, I think this is cultural and cohort related.
- This question seems a bit of generational judgement. Maybe the engagement is in a different form that what we expect. Maybe what we see as "less involved" or different means of tracking news is not lesser, but different???
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[edit] Civic Engagement Question Two
Are the boundaries of civic engagement changing for young people online? For example, when can online spaces such as myspace and facebook constitute forums for civic engagement? Do protests in online games constitute civic engagement? If so, how can such engagement experiences translate into broader participation in politics, and public life?
- I think that it is wonderful to see how online tools can be used to marshall grass-roots public opinion when it is needed. I definitely think that the processes involved in in-game protoests are the same as those needed in the real world. Civil disobedience is civil disobedience.
- Political thought, argument, and action are all part of civilization -- questions about the redefinition and globalization of "civic" boundaries as facilitated by online community intrigue me as much if not more than 'protesting'in cyber realms.
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[edit] Civic Engagement Question Three
What strategies can we develop to stimulate more creative and democratic opportunities for young people to raise their public voices?
- Have more honest people run for office....
- Solicit participation from 501c3s and NGOs in digital media such as this site.
- The BBC's Newsround website http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews is an excellent example of getting children engaged with the world and other public service broadcasters/news media should follow this example of best practice - Nolligan
- Well they need to see some evidence that their actions can make a difference
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[edit] Formatting answers to the questions
As you include your answers to these questions, you are encouraged to focus more on the ideas than the formatting, and so a simple approach has been chosen as an example. An asterisk followed by a space makes it a bulleted list item, and everything else can be plain text. Note that everything must be in a single paragraph with only a single carriage return at the end.
* Your perspective on the question would look like this.
