Driving CIVIC Participation Through Social Media

Abstract

Web 2.0's value is not in revolutionary technological change, it lies in the fundamental changes that have occurred in our underlying social processes. The value of new interactive tools lies not in their technological brilliance but in their ability to facilitate new methods of participation and support widespread social networks and issues-based agendas. The internet is becoming a ‘business as usual’ tool for how we live, work, socialize and participate. We tend to focus on the transformational potential of informational and social digital networks but it is also important to understand how civil societies have evolved from being community-based and ideologically-driven to being based on economy and individualism. Democratic drift and political alienation are long standing problems in many countries. Beginning in the 1950s campaign-led NGOs, such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and Greenpeace, emerged as an early response to falling political satisfaction. Yet these megaliths of civil society now seem strangely out of place in an era of rapidly emergent viral campaigns and Facebook. Social media ‐ the social web ‐ is at the heart of a changing political and civic landscape, bringing together otherwise disparate individuals around shared beliefs. Weak ties ‐ these networks of association ‐ become precursors to civic engagement bridging multiple collections of acquaintances. Yet effective engagement is difficult to sustain. It is a many-stage, cyclical and self-re-enforcing process and in this lies its weakness; faults in the process create numerous points of failure and so Web2.0 is a timely tool to support radical new ways of socially organising for effective change. This paper will frame the background to the uptake of social media by describing the societal changes that have occurred over the last 30 years and then discussing how these have transformed the nature and role of civil society and led to increased civic and political disconnection amongst citizens. Partly in response to these transformations and partly as a reaction to disengagement we have seen the rise of a more professionalised civil society and this paper discusses how the NGO sector has itself changed to become partners in technocratic government discourses that further exclude citizens from the decision making process. The paper then goes on to discuss the background to online engagement and aligns this with the concept of ‘weak ties’ (Granovetter, 1982), suggesting that social media is successful because it supports societal and attitudinal shifts that are more focussed on loose networks of association, immediacy and issues rather than ideologies, focussing also on the disruptive nature and potential of social media as a transformative tool. Finally the paper contextualise disruption and civic engagement by arguing that, for this to be effective and for citizens to become active participants in civic processes, they require education, both formally through schools and informally through their local community resources and networks.

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