Monthly Archives: March 2006

websites for civic renewal

Along the right-hand column of this page, I’ve been running automated excerpts from blogs about civic renewal. Below is a list of these blogs, including some exciting newcomers. All these sites provide a high dose of news and information (along with some commentary and opinion) and emphasize civic work of various kinds:

  • Civic Mission of Schools blog, with the daily news on civic education and youth service, provided in part by CIRCLE graduate assistant Gary Homana.
  • Smart Communities, a blog by the President of the Pew Partnership for Civic Change, Suzanne Morse
  • The Public Journalism Network Blog: keeping alive the spirit of public or civic journalism
  • The National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation’s news page, for practical work on public deliberation
  • International Civic Engagement blog from Park University
  • Public Engagement, a blog by the University of Minnesota’s Associate VP for Public Engagement, Victor Bloomfield
  • Silver in Seattle, by David Silver, guru of online civic work
  • Otherwise Engaged by Alexandra Samuel: “Every blogger’s guide to civic engagement. Every citizen’s guide to blogging.”
  • Democracy LABlog, with Lars Hasselblad Torres’ “updates from the field”
  • democracy as education, education for democracy

    I’ve been commissioned to write an article about John Dewey’s 1927 book, The Public and its Problems, and what it implies for contemporary democratic practice. Given my own interests, I have focused on its implications for public deliberation and civic education. My whole first draft is pasted “below the fold” for anyone who’s interested in Dewey or the philosophy of democratic education.

    Continue reading

    the Comic Book Project

    I spent yesterday in Philadelphia meeting various people, including a representative from the Comic Book Project. This outfit is active in 10 cities. Kids–mostly in middle school–are taught to make comic books on various social themes. The results look fantastic, because the program can teach non-artistic kids to make nice looking art from models. (Two young guys chose to make a comic book that describes the process–their book is a good one to start with.) Making comic books has lots of potential to teach literacy and civic skills to kids who are not otherwise captivated by school.

    digital media: the audience problem

    I’m writing a mini-proposal for a project on the digital media and civic engagement. I’m thinking of exploring the following problem.

    A new generation is coming of age at a time when various electronic media are ominipresent, cheap, and sophisticated. Two contradictory aspects of the new media will influence civic development. On one hand, people around the world can, with increasing ease, get access to the same materials–whether music, video, or political speeches and statements. Some items become extraordinarily popular. They often feature talented celebrities who have the support of technical experts. Although some products backed by big corporations fail in the marketplace, corporate investment at least increases the odds of obtaining a large audience. There is also the network-concentration problem that I mentioned last Friday: a few websites draw an enormous amount of traffic, presumably because they are popular; therefore, people (including me) want to know what they’re saying. What is popular tends to become more so.

    The easy availability of celebrity culture reduces demand for ordinary people’s creativity and makes the world more homogeneous, thus frustrating local communities (and even whole nations) that want to govern their own cultures. The more that slick, professional products penetrate the international market, the less scope exists for ordinary people to create cultural products that others will value. This phenomenon is relevant to “civic engagement.” We participate not only by influencing our governments, but also by helping to shape our cultures.

    On the other hand, the same technology that gives billions of human beings instant access to the world’s most popular culture also allows the same billions to produce and disseminate their own ideas, which can be diverse and relevant to their communities. Never has it been as cheap or quick to produce text, sound, or moving images. This opportunity for creativity has great civic potential; it could turn people from spectators and consumers into creators.

    However, most young people do not have such extraordinary talent (or privileged positions in networks) that they can gain huge followings. If there are several million blogs, then the average blog will attract just a few visitors. The topics that young people know best are very local, and that means that not many other people have an interest in what they say. And even if you attend the same school as someone, you may not be interested in her views about local issues like school uniforms or cafeteria food–not when you can download a professional video for free.

    An audience needn’t be big, but it must be interested and responsive, or else creativity is discouraging. What can help an ordinary group of kids to build a responsive and interactive audience? Do some technical choices matter? For example, is podcasting promising? Or must we change the context in which youth spend their time? For example, it seems plausible that students who attend a small high school with a coherent academic theme will be more interested in one another’s cultural products than students who attend a large “shopping mall” high school with lots of separate cliques. I would like to investigate these topics by looking for online youth products that do and do not have responsive audiences, and asking about the reasons for the differences.

    Israel’s “right to exist”

    My colleague Jerry Segal is also president of the Jewish Peace Lobby. He has an interesting recent editorial in Ha’aretz in which he recalls his meeting with senior PLO officials in Tunis in 1988. They were willing to accept peace with the state of Israel and to renounce terrorism, but not to accept Israel’s “right to exist.” Khalid al-Hassan, a Fatah official, told Segal that this right was “ideology.”

    Segal explains that to accept Israel’s “right to exist” is ambiguous. It could just mean that Israel, as a member of the United Nations, may not be invaded or threatened with conquest. However, given the way the phrase is commonly used, it could imply that it was morally legitimate to create a Jewish state in the Middle East in 1948; in other words, that Israel had a moral right to exist from its birth. That affirmation is too much to ask of a Palestinian, who may believe that the foundation of Israel was a violation of the Arab residents’ rights.

    Speaking for myself, I think that it was legitimate, on balance, to partition Palestine and to create a Jewish state in one portion of the territory. But there were reasonable people on all sides (including Hannah Arendt and Martin Buber) who disagreed. In any case, the Palestinians’ obligation today is only to make peace with the actual state of Israel. They shouldn’t be required to affirm that its foundation was legitimate. After all, almost all states have dubious origins–including the United States, which traces its history to European conquest of Native Americans’ land. Nevertheless, the United States has a right under Article II of the UN Charter not to be attacked or threatened with attack. This right seems justified because: (a) millions of Americans have made homes in US territory and support the US government, and (b) peace and development are generally best served if nation-states “live together in peace with one another as good neighbours.”

    Thus Hamas (which has a right, thanks to its electoral victory, to control its own nascent nation-state) should be pressed to undertake a peace treaty with Israel that sets legitimate and inviolable borders. Such a treaty would recognize Israel as a legitimate party to negotiations with the Palestinian state–something that Hamas currently resists. But Hamas should not be pressed to acknowledge Israel’s “right to exist,” which (in the context of the historical debate) means acknowledging that the Zionist project was right from the start. That would be a humiliating — and unneccessary — abandonment of some core principles of Palestinian and Arab nationalist ideology. Members of Hamas may retain a permanent grievance about ’48 as long as they accept Israel as a fait accompli and renounce war.