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Encouraging Engagement
Posted on Wednesday, March 28, 2007 at 10:49 AM by Jason Barker
I've read with interest some recent posts on Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning about encouraging civic engagement among teens and young adults. Lance Bennett recently uploaded transcripts from an online discussion he held with scholars and practitioners in youth engagement, and then uploaded the draft of a paper discussing the issue. While the subject of teen governmental activity is at most tangential to this blog, and the discussions are far too wide-ranging for coverage here, a very brief summary of the issue is nonetheless helpful because the general scenario is also applicable to youth religious involvement.
Essentially, Bennett states that there are two competing paradigms regarding youth civic involvement:
The engaged youth paradigm implicitly emphasizes generational changes in social identity that have resulted in the growing importance of peer networks and online communities. In this view, if there is an a decline in the credibility or authenticity of many public institutions and discourses that define conventional political life, the fault lies more with the government performances and news narratives than with citizens who cannot engage with them. In an important sense, this paradigm emphasizes the empowerment of youth as expressive individuals, and symbolically frees young people to make their own creative choices. In the bargain, the engaged youth paradigm also eases the overriding duty to participate in conventional government-centered activities. In many cases, researchers in this school are only dimly aware of (and may tend to discount) research on declines and deficits in more conventional political participation among young citizens. As a result, the engaged youth paradigm opens the door to a new spectrum of civic actions in online arenas from MySpace to World of Warcraft.
By contrast, the disengaged youth paradigm may acknowledge the rise of more autonomous forms of public expression such as consumer politics, or the occasional protest in MySpace, while keeping the focus on the large body of empirical data showing a generational decline in connections to government (e.g., voting patterns) and general civic involvement (e.g., following public affairs in the news) as threats to the health of democracy itself. Those speak of disengaged youth often worry about the personalization or privatization of the political sphere (young people living in heavily commercial online worlds), and focus more on how to promote public actions that link to government as the center of democratic politics, and to other social groups and institutions as the foundations of civic life.
The question is how can we resolve these different perspectives so that we can have a more productive discussion of education programs and policies? To begin with, consider the possibility that these different views of young people and political engagement reflect actual generational changes in the nature of citizenship itself. Proponents of the disengaged citizen paradigm seem to be using an earlier generational model of citizenship (centered on duties and obligations) to evaluate younger generations, while those seeing more engaged citizens seem to be focusing on changes in identity (involving needs for more self actualization, personal expression and individuality) associated with globalization and life in late modern society.
Anyone who has spent much time reading this blog knows that, from a religious (rather than political) perspective, I generally agree with the "disengaged youth paradigm" (this recent post being evidence). The primary reason for this, of course, is due to the fact that, as an Orthodox Christian, I support traditional Christianity and religious involvement, and thus see youth disengagement from the Church and society in general as highly problematic. Another reason, however, is that I find unconvincing - largely because they are unsupported by my personal observations, and because most of the research I've encountered seems to conclude differently - most of the arguments asserting that youth are becoming highly involved in widespread social networks that are increasingly involved in social action. What I mean is that, while youth are certainly spending significant amounts of time in virtual social networks (e.g., MySpace), the level of involvement seems to be largely superficial: not only is the depth of communication low, but the amount of time spent developing core relationships within any one virtualized social network is quite limited. In other words, from what I can discern, in a specific online episode youth generally move through a variety of virtualized networks engaging in brief messaging with an array of people, but seldom spend much time in any one virtualized network or communicating at length and in depth with any one person (or small group of people) who is geographically distant from them.
With whom, then, are youth really spending their time? They are generally still spending their time with youth with whom they are in close physical proximity: i.e., the majority of time they spend communicating online is used to communicate with their social network at their school or in their immediate community. And this, really, is both predictable and appropriate.
Despite this point, it is true that youth are engaging in at least limited virtual interaction with widespread social networks, and this interaction will almost certainly not decrease. We Orthodox Christians need to accept this reality, and work within it to reach youth whose religious engagement currently limited to online communities. There is a real need for Orthodox social networking media, and I hope to see some developed. This would increase our outreach to non-affiliated youth, as well as benefiting those Orthodox youth who because of their locale have few opportunities for interaction with other Orthodox Christians their age. To use the tiny mission at which I'm a member as an example, we have two youth: a sixteen year-old girl and my three year-old son (at 37, I'm the third-youngest member of the mission), and we live 90 miles from another Orthodox church. Online Orthodox social networks would be a tremendous asset to youth growing up in circumstances like this.
At the same time, such online social networks must ultimately never be more than a introduction to Orthodoxy for unaffiliated youth, and a supplement for Orthodox youth: as I've said many times before, the Orthodox life is communal, and thus our emphasis should always be on inclusion in - and thus activity within - the local Orthodox community. Our spiritual life must never be limited to autonomous activity.
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