So far this year, I’ve been unable to find the time to write on the TTP blog beyond my newsletter, The Weekly Brief. That’s not because I wasn’t writing, it’s just all of my essay writing energies were going to other places. Namely, fellowships and other websites. I finally got a breathing space here to share some of that writing with you. Below is the introduction to an essay of mine that got published late last year on Mere Orthodoxy. I hope you enjoy it.
Asynchronous Citizens: Addressing Flaws in Digital Citizenship
The 2011 Pew Research Center study, “Teens, Kindness and Cruelty on Social Network Sites” is one of many evaluating the experience of the young on social media. Given ongoing concerns about the effects of social media on young people, the headline is hardly surprising or shocking. However, the subtitle of the report, “How American Teens Navigate the New World of Digital Citizenship,” raises a few questions: What is digital citizenship? If social media heralds a “new world” requiring a new kind of citizenship, what are the implications for our practices of citizenship in our temporal, physical communities?
Digital citizenship is a concept of citizenship defined in terms of a heavily mediated technological environment. This fundamentally changes the classical function of the citizen from one who participates in and contributes to a physical community to one who merely exists within a space. This should be of concern to parents, academics and society at large. Digital citizenship as a technological construct reduces the noble concept of classical citizenship to a sum of transactions, which poses a danger to developing citizenship within the context of a local community. Like Huxley’s Brave New World, the implicit assumption of the need to leave classical concepts of citizenship behind for a new ethic appears to be less than utopian. When it comes to a governing ethic for communication and interaction online, digital citizenship is a concept that sacrifices much to achieve little.
This essay uses Ursula Franklin’s holistic-prescriptive dichotomy of technology to critique the concept of digital citizenship as a governing principle for modeling and teaching online interactions. It argues that concepts of classical citizenship provide a better framework for engaging in digital spaces, specifically on social media platforms.
Continue reading this essay on Mere Orthodoxy