Monthly Archives: May 2015

what will Snapchat do to politics?

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Joanthan Mahler reports that “Snapchat, America’s fastest-growing smartphone app, [has] hired Peter Hamby, a political reporter for CNN, to lead its nascent news division.” Snapchat has more than 1oo million users, including many Americans between the ages of 18 and 31. Mahler quotes President Obama’s former senior strategist Dan Pfeiffer: “There is no harder riddle to solve in politics than reaching young Americans who are very interested in the future of their country but don’t engage with traditional news.” By entering the political news business, Pfeiffer thinks, “Snapchat may have just made it a whole lot easier to solve this riddle.”

Snapchat’s potential to increase young adults’ involvement with politics is one reason that the news about Peter Hamby is interesting. The other reason is an apparent contradiction. Snapchat is famous for extreme brevity. A “Snap” lasts on your phone or other device for no longer than 10 seconds. Hamby, as Mahler notes, wrote a report for Harvard’s Shorenstein Center about–as it turns out–the damage that Twitter’s brevity and speed has done to American politics. I quote from the final section of the report:

No one is complaining about the revolutionary gateway to news and information that Twitter provides. But plenty of people in politics are anxious about the way the Twitter conversation thrives on incrementalism, self-involvement and snark.

“It made me think smaller when I should have been thinking bigger,” said Sam Youngman.

“Twitter just gives you an outlet for when you’re bored,” said another reporter who traveled on the Romney plane. “It’s just stupid shit you are not thinking about the ramifications of.”

John Dickerson [Slate writer and CBS Political Director], hardly a new media curmudgeon, called Twitter “a mess for campaign coverage.”

“It makes us small and it makes us pissed off and mean, because Twitter as a conversation is incredibly acerbic and cynical and we don’t need more of that in coverage of politics, we need less,” he said.

…

“I still don’t know how reporters sit and watch a speech, and live tweet a speech, and also have the bandwidth to listen to what candidates are saying, and actually think about it and absorb it so they can right a comprehensive story afterwards,” said Liz Sidoti of the Associated Press.

…

“I don’t think the Twitter culture helps anybody create great journalism,” said Garrett Haake. “If you’re trying to be the first person that put it out at 140 characters, you’re probably not thinking about the broader context in which you want to present something.”

… Dickerson’s take: “If I were running an actual news division, I would probably ban people from Twitter in some way.” That Dickerson, one of the more forward-thinking and tech-savvy reporters in the business, would even consider such an idea speaks to how frustrated many campaign veterans are with today’s shoot-first-and-update-later style of political journalism.

Hamby’s paper for the Shorenstein Center is the exact opposite of a tweet. It is leisurely, anecdotal, sprinkled with character sketches, and 95 pages long. It doesn’t start with a gripping thesis or end with a sharply defined message but gradually unfolds an argument for the value of long-form journalism through the quoted opinions of others. You could almost say it exemplifies “negative capability,” John Keats’ phrase for not letting one’s own views determine how one sees the world.

Snapchat doesn’t exactly seem built for negative capability. So it is fascinating to speculate how a gifted writer of long-form journalism who decries the trivialization of politics will use this tool to cover the 2016 election.

notes from the Summit on Civic Learning and National Service

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On October 16, 2014, the White House, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University hosted a Summit on Civic Learning and National Service. This invitational Summit brought together 75 higher education leaders, government officials, representatives of civic organizations, and researchers studying civic learning and engagement. The rich conversation brought up many themes and disagreements.

We have posted the Summit Proceedings here. They are based on a review of the notes from the Summit, compiled and summarized by representatives from Tisch College. These are the key seven themes:

  1. Colleges and universities must support democracy. Educating for democracy and generating knowledge to serve democracy were central purposes of the Morrill Land Grant Act, the GI Bill, and the creation of community colleges. The 1947 Truman Commission on Higher Education for Democracy stated that educating for democracy “should come first … among the principal goals for higher education.” But this heritage has largely been forgotten. The public, policymakers, and leaders of higher education now appear to focus primarily on preparing students for a competitive labor market.
  2. Democratic education means engagement with politics, institutions, and contentious issues—by students, faculty, and staff in their capacity as teachers, learners, researchers, and civic actors. Serving democracy means more than service, although service-learning programs contribute to that mission. Colleges and universities should be places of courageous conversations and action, where the most pressing social, economic, and political needs the nation and world are identified, studied, and debated, and where students develop the skills and sense of agency to act on those needs.
  3. Civic learning must move from “elective and available” to “pervasive and expected.” Since the 1980s, many colleges and universities have created impressive centers and programs for civic engagement, community service, community partnerships, and related topics. These special programs represent a valuable network, distributed across the country and connecting higher education to other sectors. However, they remain fairly marginal in academia itself, enlisting especially interested students and faculty. Some of the institutions represented at the Summit have taken the next step by making civic learning pervasive or even required on their campuses.
  4. Colleges and universities should be partners in local problem solving and anchors in democratic communities. Campuses can support reciprocal faculty-community collaborative research, open their doors to the community, and serve as conveners to identify and facilitate change about local challenges.
  5. Civic learning must be measured and assessed. Unless colleges and universities collect data and use it to improve programs and hold themselves accountable for results, civic learning will not be pervasively effective. Better measurement systems would also demonstrate the value of civic learning for employment and thus mitigate the tradeoff between education for democracy and education for work.
  6. Higher education should tackle growing economic and social inequality based on class and social identity. Many students face economic barriers to civic engagement. At a time of rapidly rising college costs, students may have to work at least one job, may have children of their own, and may hold substantial debt. Some possible solutions to those barriers are course credit for public service experiences, loan forgiveness, and connecting civic and career skills.
  7.  Leadership must come from many places, including federal and state policymakers, college administrators, academic departments, students, and also from community-based organizations and business. Many positive steps were proposed at the Summit, from raising the proportion of work-study funds available for community work to changing state or even federal measurement systems to include civic outcomes. Above all, the stakeholders must return the civic and democratic mission of higher education to its traditional high status in American life.

Based on the Summit discussions, we would suggest both an interest in and a need for continued work in two areas:

  • Collective work among scholars and practitioners on what the research shows regarding the nature, scope, and effectiveness of civic learning and engagement in democracy; and
  • Further, focused discussion among educators and policy makers to prioritize specific actions at the campus, collaborative, state, and federal, levels to advance civic learning and engagement in democracy.

Community partners/representatives should be key participants in both sets of discussions

community organizing, community-engaged research, and the problem of scale

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“I have yet to see something big that’s good.” So said a friend and esteemed colleague  at a conference that I have been attending for the past two days. The conference is on “Collaboration Research for Action and Equity in Education,” and most of the participants practice either community-engaged research or community organizing. They build or participate in rather small, participatory projects, but they also care about large forces and structures. So the problem that my friend posed is a fundamental one for them.

I actually don’t believe that the precise issue that matters is scale. In the 21st century, things that used to be limited to small scales (such as friendship networks and discussions) can now be very big. The difference that interests me is between relational politics and impersonal politics.

In relational politics, you know the other people you are affecting directly. You know their names and locations and something about what they want. There is at least a possibility that you can work together. In impersonal politics, you affect people you have never heard of or met. Impersonal politics includes such structures as votes, laws, rights, policies, large firms, and markets.

The two categories certainly come together. In fact, the street-level impact of impersonal politics is almost always relational. For instance, the edge of the policies that produce mass incarceration in the United States is the back of a police van in Baltimore. The police officers there knew Freddie Gray.

That example reminds us that relational politics isn’t preferable to impersonal politics. You can’t be truly cruel without being in a relationship with the victim. From office politics–or the activities of “street-level bureaucrats” (like police officers)–to torture, some of the most problematic human interactions are relational. And impersonal structures include such excellent creations as legal rights.

But we do need relational politics, because only in relationships can we learn from other people, build networks that are sources of power and capacity, and act with agency. It is only in relational politics that we can seriously ask the question “What should we do?” A difference between the conference I am attending and a more standard conference on urban America is not that this one has been more critical. There is a vast scholarly literature that documents and analyzes inequality and oppression. You can walk up and down the halls of a hotel during a sociology, public health, or education conference, and in every room they will be talking about oppression. But they are addressing the question “What should be done?”, not “What should we do?” Agency is lost when politics and research are impersonal rather than relational.

And yet practitioners of community-engaged research and community organizing are also deeply concerned about impersonal politics. One of the most frequently-used words at this conference was “neoliberalism,” understand as some kind of mass-scale and impersonal system. (But note that a social democracy would also be highly impersonal.)

So how can we make the relational improve the impersonal? I think the most common strategy is to create or support relational projects, connect them together in networks, recruit others to join the networks, and advocate for policies in institutions like universities that will directly support these projects. (For instance, we might advocate changes in the kinds of research that help scholars win tenure.) This strategy has been implicit in a lot of my own work. But I must admit that I don’t really believe in it, because I don’t believe that networks of relational projects will seriously trouble existing impersonal systems. Finding a better connection between the relational and the impersonal seems to me the most pressing issue of our time.

See also beyond small is beautiful; leverage as a moral issue; and civic relationships (what they are and why they matter).