Introduction

Civic Engagement and Community Information:
Five Strategies to Revive Civic Communication

A White Paper on the Civic Engagement Recommendations of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy

by Peter Levine

Skilled people, appropriate technologies, and reliable and relevant information are the building blocks of a successful communications environment. What generates news and information in that environment, however, is not just those building blocks. It is engagement—specifically, people’s engagement with information and with each other.

—Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age

Introduction

By itself, information is inert. It needs interpretation, discussion, judgment, motivation, action, and production to become knowledge that is of any use in a democracy. The “public sphere” is the (metaphorical) space in which we make information into knowledge valuable for public purposes and connect it to action, production and power.

Traditionally, the American public sphere has been composed predominantly of various sorts of associations that promote discussion among their own members and between themselves and outsiders. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s, the associations he observed were predominantly local, voluntary groups. They held regular face-to-face meetings. Their most important means for distributing knowledge and opinions were newspapers, which were carried by the U.S. mail. Associations needed newspapers to communicate and they arose in response to the news. Thus, Tocqueville wrote, “There is a necessary connection between public associations and newspapers: newspapers make associations and associations make newspapers. And if it has been correctly advanced that associations will increase in number as the conditions of men become more equal, it is not less certain that the number of newspapers increases in proportion to that of associations. Thus it is in America that we find at the same time the greatest number of associations and of newspapers” (Tocqueville, 1954).

The ecosystem that Tocqueville described flourished throughout the 19th century and much of the 20th century, but is now in steep decline, as shown by the trends in Exhibit 1:

Exhibit 1. Civic Participation and Newspaper Readership

Sources: GSS is General Social Survey. DDB is DDB Needham Life Style Survey. Analysis by the author.

In light of Tocqueville’s observations, the parallel lines for newspaper readership and attendance at face-to-face meetings are especially striking. We should be concerned by those declines if we value public deliberation, which has traditionally occurred within associations, at meetings, informed by newspapers (Cohen, 1999).

The declines shown above began before the Internet was widely used for virtual discussions and news. Therefore, it cannot be the case that people deliberately renounced face-to-face meetings and newspapers because they had online alternatives. But perhaps after the old order described by Tocqueville had badly decayed, people began to find online substitutes not shown in Exhibit 1.

Internet users are quite likely to say that they have looked for political or government-related information online and that they have discussed policies and issues online. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, “48 percent of Internet users have looked for information about a public policy or issue online with their local, state or federal government,” and “23 percent of Internet users participate in the online debate around government policies or issues, with much of this discussion occurring outside of official government channels” (Smith, 2010). People who use the Internet are more likely to vote, volunteer, and join groups than those who are not online (Corporation for National and Community Service, 2010). As a group, they are also wealthier and better educated. All of these demographic factors could explain their higher levels of civic engagement. Young people who use social media (such as Facebook and YouTube) are more likely to volunteer, whether they are college students or working-class youth who have never attended college (Kirby, Marcelo & Kawashima-Ginsberg, 2009).

If the Internet has helped to restore civic society, we should see increases in civic engagement since 2000. Unfortunately, the survey questions that generated Exhibit 1 have not been continued since 2005. But Exhibit 2 shows the long-term trends in two other measures—voter turnout and attention to the news (i.e., the proportion of respondents who say that they follow the news and public affairs “most of the time” or “some of the time”)—for Americans between the ages of 18 and 24. Young Americans have adopted the Internet more rapidly than their older counterparts.

Exhibit 2. Young People’s Attention to News and Voter Turnout

Sources: U.S. Census and the American National Election Studies (ANES).

Youth voter turnout rose in presidential elections after 2000; and news interest has increased a bit, even as the traditional news media has suffered. These are promising developments, but society has a long way to go to recover levels of news interest seen among young people in previous decades. Although the turnout increase may be traced in part to new online civic tools, 2004 and 2008 were high-intensity presidential election years, and there are few reasons to be confident that youth turnout will remain high.

In short, it remains to be seen whether the new communications media alone are adequate to the task of civic renewal. But certainly the old civil society is in deep decay, and we must rebuild our public sphere with new materials, as our predecessors have done several times in the past. For instance, Americans of the founding era invented Committees of Correspondence, and citizens of the Progressive Era launched most of the large national membership organizations. Today’s building blocks include digital technologies and networks, as well as new forms of face-to-face association.

The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy (Knight Commission) makes the following recommendations that are related to civic engagement (I cite them using the numbers in the full report):

• Recommendation 11: Expand local media initiatives to reflect the entire reality of the communities they represent.

• Recommendation 12: Engage young people in developing the digital information and communication capacities of local communities.

• Recommendation 13: Empower all citizens to participate actively in community self-governance, including local “community summits” to address community affairs and pursue common goals.

• Recommendation 14: Emphasize community information flow in the design and enhancement of a local community’s public spaces.

• Recommendation 15: Ensure that every local community has at least one high-quality online hub.

This paper proposes five correlating strategies to advance these goals (for additional implementation strategies related to Recommendation 15, see also Adam Thierer’s white paper, Creating Local Online Hubs: Three Models for Action).

Previous Page |  Next Page >> Strategy 1:  Create a Civic Information Corps using the nation’s “service” infrastructure to generate knowledge