Citizen Engagement And Public Participation In The Era Of New Media

New media forums have created a unique opportunity for citizens to participate in a variety of social and political contexts. As new social technologies are being utilized in a variety of ways, the public is able to interact more effectively in activities within their communities. The Handbook of Research on Citizen Engagement and Public Participation in the Era of New Media addresses opportunities and challenges in the theory and practice of public involvement in social media. Highlighting various communication modes and best practices being utilized in citizen-involvement activities, this book is a critical reference source for professionals, consultants, university teachers, practitioners, community organizers, government administrators, citizens, and activists.

Recent technological advancements have made it possible to use moderated discussion threads on social media to provide citizens with a means of discussion concerning issues that involve them. With the renewed interest in devising new methods for public involvement, the use of such communication tools has caused some concern on how to properly apply them for strategic purposes. Using New Media for Citizen Engagement and Participation provides emerging research exploring the theoretical and practical aspects of how social media should be added to public-involvement activities such as citizen juries, public deliberation, and citizen panels. Readers will be offered insights into the critical design considerations for planning, carrying out, and assessing public-involvement initiatives. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as citizen journalism, online activism, and public discourse, this book is ideally designed for corporate professionals, broadcasters, news writers, column editors, politicians, policy managers, government administrators, academicians, researchers, practitioners, and students in the fields of political science, communications, sociology, mass media and broadcasting, public administration, and community-service learning.

This book examines the media's role in shaping civic engagement and enhancing political engagement.

The development of social technologies has brought about a new era of political planning and government interactions. In addition to reducing costs in city resource management, ICT and social media can be used in emergency situations as a mechanism for citizen engagement, to facilitate public administration communication, etc. In spite of all these advantages, the application of technologies by governments and the public sector has also fostered debate in terms of cyber security due to the vulnerabilities and risks that can befall different stakeholders. It is necessary to review the most recent research about the implementation of ICTs in the public sector with the aim of understanding both the strengths and the vulnerabilities that the management models can entail. Digital Government and Achieving E-Public Participation: Emerging Research and Opportunities is a collection of innovative research on the methods and applications of ICT implementation in the public sector that seeks to allow readers to understand how ICTs have forced public administrations to undertake reforms to both their workflow and their means of interacting with citizens. While highlighting topics including e-government, emergency communications, and urban planning, this book is ideally designed for government officials, public administrators, public managers, policy holders, policymakers, public consultants, professionals, academicians, students, and researchers seeking current research on the digital communication channels between elected officials and the citizens they represent.

The Occupy movement and the Arab Spring have brought global attention to the potential of social media for empowering otherwise marginalized groups. This book addresses questions like what happens after the moment of protest and global visibility and whether social media can also help sustain civic engagement beyond protest.

The powerful potential of digital media to engage citizens in political actions has now crossed our news screens many times. But scholarly focus has tended to be on "networked," anti-institutional forms of collective action, to the neglect of advocacy and service organizations. This book investigates the changing fortunes of the citizen-civil society relationship by exploring how social changes and innovations in communication technology are transforming the information expectations and preferences of many citizens, especially young citizens. In doing so, it is the first work to bring together theories of civic identity change with research on civic organizations. Specifically, it argues that a shift in "information styles" may help to explain the disjuncture felt by many young people when it comes to institutional participation and politics. The book theorizes two paradigms of information style: a dutiful style, which was rooted in the society, communication system and citizen norms of the modern era, and an actualizing style, which constitutes the set of information practices and expectations of the young citizens of late modernity for whom interactive digital media are the norm. Hypothesizing that civil society institutions have difficulty adapting to the norms and practices of the actualizing information style, two empirical studies apply the dutiful/actualizing framework to innovative content analyses of organizations' online communications-on their websites, and through Facebook. Results demonstrate that with intriguing exceptions, most major civil society organizations use digital media more in line with dutiful information norms than actualizing ones: they tend to broadcast strategic messages to an audience of receivers, rather than encouraging participation or exchange among an active set of participants. The book concludes with a discussion of the tensions inherent in bureaucratic organizations trying to adapt to an actualizing information style, and recommendations for how they may more successfully do so.

Examinations of civic engagement in digital culture—the technologies, designs, and practices that support connection through common purpose in civic, political, and social life. Countless people around the world harness the affordances of digital media to enable democratic participation, coordinate disaster relief, campaign for policy change, and strengthen local advocacy groups. The world watched as activists used social media to organize protests during the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and Hong Kong's Umbrella Revolution. Many governmental and community organizations changed their mission and function as they adopted new digital tools and practices. This book examines the use of “civic media”—the technologies, designs, and practices that support connection through common purpose in civic, political, and social life. Scholars from a range of disciplines and practitioners from a variety of organizations offer analyses and case studies that explore the theory and practice of civic media. The contributors set out the conceptual context for the intersection of civic and media; examine the pressure to innovate and the sustainability of innovation; explore play as a template for resistance; look at civic education; discuss media-enabled activism in communities; and consider methods and funding for civic media research. The case studies that round out each section range from a “debt resistance” movement to government service delivery ratings to the “It Gets Better” campaign aimed at combating suicide among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer youth. The book offers a valuable interdisciplinary dialogue on the challenges and opportunities of the increasingly influential space of civic media.

The future engagement of young citizens from a wide range of socio-economic, ethnic and cultural backgrounds in democratic politics remains a crucial concern for academics, policy-makers, civics teachers and youth workers around the world. At a time when the negative relationship between socio-economic inequality and levels of political participation is compounded by high youth unemployment or precarious employment in many countries, it is not surprising that new social media communications may be seen as a means to re-engage young citizens. This edited collection explores the influence of social media, such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, upon the participatory culture of young citizens. This collection, comprising contributions from a number of leading international scholars in this field, examines such themes as the possible effects of social media use upon patterns of political socialization; the potential of social media to ameliorate young people’s political inequality; the role of social media communications for enhancing the civic education curriculum; and evidence for social media manifesting new forms of political engagement and participation by young citizens. These issues are considered from a number of theoretical and methodological approaches but all attempt to move beyond simplistic notions of young people as an undifferentiated category of ‘the internet generation’.

I. Theories of Engagement -- Foreword / Phoebe Sengers -- 1. The Ideas and Ideals in Urban Media / Martijn de Waal -- 2. The Moral Economy of Social Media / Paul Dourish and Christine Satchell -- 3. The Protocological Surround: Reconceptualizing Radio and Architecture in the Wireless City / Gillian Fuller and Ross Harley -- 4. Mobile Media and the Strategies of Urban Citizenship: Control, Responsibilization, Politicization / Kurt Iveson -- II. Civic Engagement -- Foreword / Yvonne Rogers -- 5. Advancing Design for Sustainable Food Cultures / Jaz Hee-jeong Choi and Eli Blevis -- 6. Building Digital Participation Hives: Toward a Local Public Sphere / Fiorella De Cindio and Cristian Peraboni -- 7. Between Experience, Affect, and Information: Experimental Urban Interfaces in the Climate Change Debate / Jonas Fritsch and Martin Brynskov -- 8. More Than Friends: Social and Mobile Media for Activist Organizations / Tad Hirsch -- 9. Gardening Online: A Tale of Suburban Informatics / Bjorn Nansen, Jon M. Pearce and Wally Smith -- 10. The Rise of the Expert Amateur: Citizen Science and Microvolunteerism / Eric Paulos, Sunyoung Kim, and Stacey Kuznetsov -- III. Creative Engagement -- Foreword / Gary Marsden -- 11. Street Haunting: Sounding the Invisible City / Sarah Barns -- 12. Family Worlds: Technological Engagement for Families Negotiating Urban Traffic / Hilary Davis ... [et al.] -- 13. Urban Media: New Complexities, New Possibilities -- A Manifesto / Christopher Kirwan and Sven Travis -- 14. Bjørnetjeneste: Using the City as a Backdrop for Location-Based Interactive Narratives / Jeni Paay and Jesper Kjeldskov -- 15. Mobile Interactions as Social Machines: Poor Urban Youth at Play in Bangladesh / Andrew Wong and Richard Ling -- IV. Technologies of Engagement -- Foreword / Atau Tanaka -- 16. Sensing, Projecting, and Interpreting Digital Identity through Bluetooth: From Anonymous Encounters to Social Engagement / Ava Fatah gen. Schieck ... [et al.] -- 17. The Policy and Export of Ubiquitous Place: Investigating South Korean U-Cities / Germaine Halegoua -- 18. Engaging Citizens and Community with the UBI Hotspots / Timo Ojala ... [et al.] -- 19. Crowdsensing in the Web: Analyzing the Citizen Experience in the Urban Space / Franscisco C. Pereira ... [et al.] -- 20. Empowering Urban Communities through Social Commonalities / Laurianne Sitbon ... [et al.] -- V. Design Engagement -- Foreword / Mark Blythe -- 21. A Streetscape Portal / Michael Arnold -- 22. Nonanthropocentrism and the Nonhuman in Design: Possibilities for Designing New Forms of Engagement with and through Technology / Carl DiSalvo and Jonathan Lukens -- 23. Building the Open-Source City: Changing Work Environments for Collaboration and Innovation / Laura Forlano -- 24. Dramatic Character Development Personas to Tailor Apartment Designs for Different Residential Lifestyles / Mark Foth ... [et al.].