Putting the "So What?" in Social Media

Over the summer, I've been noticing a perceptible shift at conferences and presentations about the role that social media is playing in journalism, government, and and civic engagement. Instead of "Gee whiz!" and "No way!" I'm hearing a lot more "For who?" and "So what?"

This new tone was evident at the June Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) conference, where CSM Research Fellow Deanna Zandt delivered a popular keynote presentation based on her new book, Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking 

Zandt addressed the conference theme head on, noting that "the Internet" can't "fix politics"—people will have to do it, by challenging power relationships. Social media can serve as a tool in that process, she said, but people have to do the heavy lifting, by being authentic in their online interactions, cross-pollinating conversation across social boundaries, and embracing empathy. "Empathy," she noted, "is the opposite of apathy." The upshot? Becoming comfortable with communicating seemingly trivial details via social media can be the first step in learning how to effectively use such platforms to organize around issues—a point also underscored in Clay Shirky's presentation on digital representation and collective action.

But, as Ethan Zuckerman noted in his planned remarks for the conference, the growth in such plugged-in social media users is too often an underused resource for organizers and journalists hoping to address social injustices. "I believe that the shift towards participation online means that movements that don’t invite our active participation are going to suffer and wither," he writes. "It’s imperative to enable participation if you want people to react to your cause with anything but apathy. I also believe there’s a danger that the energy we’re capable of summoning through social media will dissipate without impact if we don’t learn from experienced, seasoned activists and build strategies that figure out who to target and why, not just novel new ways to gain attention."

This refrain echoed throughout the conference: new tools and platforms alone won't transform politics or society. What will is engaging people through well-designed projects that creatively use participatory and mobile tools to provide contexts for learning, connection and action.

In my PDF panel, "Civic/collaborative Media Models: What's Working and Why?", we explored a few such projects. Chris Csikszentmihályi of the Center for Future Civic Media presented Sourcemap, an open source project that allows companies, consumers and government to trace the global supply chain and carbon footprint of particular commercial products. Scott Rosenberg described the progress of MediaBugs, a site designed to help users petition San Francisco-based outlets to correct their errors. And Felipe Heusser demonstrated Vota Inteligente, a suite of tools designed to help voters in Latin America demand government transparency.

Each of these projects has clear goals, and encourages not only active individual engagement, but interactions among networks of individuals and the organizations they seek to hold accountable. In my presentation, I explored some of the ways that media projects can aim for that same clarity in their engagement efforts:

Often the reason they're struggling because they're still working with the assumptions of gatekept broadcast communication as a guide. The concept that users could bring resources to bear—ideas for news coverage, pressing community issues to discuss, networks of like-minded participants—does not fit into their mental models of how public broadcasting functions. They are operating from a station-centric set of assumptions, when what's needed—as we have described in our white paper and Public Media Showcase—is a user-centered approach that prioritizes civic agency over consumption.

But, compared to even a year ago, there are more glimmers of acceptance, more moments of excitement, more experiments being held up as replicable models rather than dismissed as one-offs. As social media platforms become ever more commonplace, we can begin to forge new social contracts about the functions that public media can and should be expected to perfom—not just for, but in concert with publics.