Obstacles to Creative Citizenship

Most people have little or no direct contact with politicians or political institutions, apart from interactions with bureaucrats who provide necessary state services – a building permit, a passport, a driver’s license. Political action beyond the most local, which almost by definition fails to gain media attention, takes place mostly at a distance, quite literally in far-away locations like national capitols but also in the sense of the exotic and rarely encountered. But of course it does capture media attention. And becomes oddly familiar. In so far as people attend to politics, it is likely to happen here, through representations. Or rather, through simulacra as Baudrillard (1995) means it: a political performance tailored specifically to media needs, almost a charade, a representation of an event that never really happened, at least as it appears to have happened. An innocuous example is when members of the US Congress make speeches on the floor of the House of Representatives or Senate to a chamber empty of their colleagues. The purpose is to be recorded by C-SPAN’s cameras, which do not reveal the lack of an audience, whose images can be used by the politicians as evidence of their oratorical skill on behalf of their constituents (Frantzich and Sullivan 1996; Packer 2010). It goes without saying that successful politicians today have media advisors who influence everything from grooming to speech patterns and gesticulations to the design of what Daniel Boorstin (1961) more than a half-century ago called pseudo-events.

The use of predictive analytics, or computer modeling of large databases to identify the likely behavior of individual voters, is now in the US a feature not only of presidential campaigns but local ones as well. Such knowledge allows highly personalized targeting of political messages (Fung 2014).

This way of knowing politics – culturally, aesthetically, imaginatively – may lead to ways of engaging politically that have similar qualities. This is recognized by Robert Putnam’s famous lament that Americans are “(n)o longer participants, we are becoming mere observers of our collective destiny . . .” (Saguaro 2001: 3). Putnam’s work claims to document a generational shift, in which the direct participation in civic activities that typified people who came of age during the Great Depression and World War II and lived their adulthood in the prosperous and secure post-war period steadily declines with their deaths. It is not insignificant that the mediatization of politics coincided with their later years (Strömback 2008). For succeeding generations, beginning with the Baby Boomers, the experience of politics took on an altogether different character. This new orientation is recognized by the psychologist Drew Westen (2007: 36), who asserts that now it is not so much the marketplace of ideas but the marketplace of emotions “that matters most in American politics.” George Marcus (2002) and his colleagues (Neuman et al. 2007) ground this observation by describing the sentimental citizen for whom emotion is as important as reason, critical in fact to the appropriate activation of thinking and acting. It was just this sort of phenomenological transformation that Raymond Williams (1975) identified when he wrote that a “new generation will have its own structure of feeling, which will not appear to have come ‘from’ anywhere . . . [It] responds in its own ways to the unique world it is inheriting, taking up many continuities . . . yet feeling its whole life in certain ways differently, and shaping its creative response into a new structure of feeling” (1975: 48; emphasis added).

Among the implications of this new political sensibility is the sort of political involvement that it will foster. It is likely to be intermittent, personal and indirect. Because politics near and far is increasingly known through the media, a citizen’s attention to issues will not only be guided by the media’s agenda-setting function but by awareness that is itself directed by media consumption patterns. These in turn may be the result of felt passions that taken together are more kaleidoscopic, even accidental, than orderly: animal rights, climate change, bicycling in car traffic, say. There may be an impulsiveness that results from media depictions and personal experience, an engagement that comes and goes.

This personal dimension, most evident in blogging, is another logical form of political participation. Putting aside the question of narcissistic naïveté, engagement that proceeds from strongly felt emotion is likely to be personal above all else. At its best, this means the capacity to define one’s individual problems as public issues shared with others to be solved collectively. Alternatively, the reverse might be true: abstract, global matters, barely understood in their complexity, but recast into the terms of one’s life whether accurately or not. An example might be viewing a news report of distant storm damage that ignites fearful memories that in turn lead to collecting used clothing to aid the familiar yet unknown survivors.

Charitable contributions (tax deductable) of this sort are popular and easy, while membership in lobbying organizations (AARP, formerly the American Association of Retired Persons) or INGOs (Human Rights Watch, World Wildlife Fund) has skyrocketed in recent years, especially in high- and middle-income countries (SustainAbility 2003: 8). Putnam (1996) adds to this list “political contributions, civil litigation, talk radio. . .” (He also refers to membership in mailing-list organizations.) As a form of political participation, these are indirect. Without leaving home, a citizen can send money over the phone or online. A tee shirt or bumper sticker displays the person’s activist allegiance, socially.

If the play of politics is available mostly as a distant performance, even a simulation of some textbook ideal, which at the same time includes elements that seem unexpectedly to address the individual citizen in personal terms, and yet remains all the while barely influence-able, with a media-life of its own – then the political knowledge of most people is unlikely to include much of the kind required in citizenship exams or sought after in civics literacy campaigns.

Instead, it is apt to be local knowledge, a variety of common sense. What local knowledge is not, in Jerome Bruner’s terms (1986: 11-13), is the logico-scientific mode of thinking. That is formal, systematic with evidence and reasoning, tentative, testable and abstract. Local knowledge is closer to what Bruner calls the narrative mode. That is rooted in “good stories, gripping drama, believable (though not necessarily ‘true’) historical accounts” (1986: 13) There, people engage in “everyday reasoning,” being “the most reasonable they can be . . .” (Smorti 2008: 227). Local knowledge is also labeled popular knowledge (Birchall 2006) and counterknowledge (Thompson 2008). These “unofficial” and even “illegitimate” bodies of knowledge offer outsider explanations, including conspiracy theories and “voodoo histories” (Aaronovitch, 2009). They include, as John Fiske (1993: 188) observes, the paranormal, numerology and superstitions, each of which has a distinctive way of knowing. Claire Birchall (2006) adds alien abduction narratives, urban legends, new age practices and gossip.

Common sense, the umbrella concept that shelters the various bodies of local knowledge, is not a dumb mirroring of the world, but a somewhat consistent way of sense-making. Clifford Geertz (2000: 75-76) characterizes it as “down-to-earth, colloquial wisdom, judgments or assessments.” Geertz says that while common sense makes the implicit claim of presenting “reality neat,” it is more: an “interpretation of the immediacies of experience.” He identifies five aspects to this vernacular reasoning (Geertz 2000: 85-92):

The experience of citizenship imbued with a commonsensical orientation to politics as conceived above would at once take representations of politics as they are and be convinced they are not what they seem: that there is a backstage out of view. Anyone can observe this double-sidedness. And yet the commonsensical orientation would probably lack the analytical insight or substantive information to reveal a great deal more. Add to this the related tabloid view of celebrities, politicians included. They are like regular people, only more so. So much more so that their very existence is entertaining, even intended to be entertaining, but also a moral lesson about the superiority of being regular (Lowenthal 1944, Bird 1992). Entertaining political celebrities do what they do, predictably. And to a point, giving them attention is rewarding. But everyone knows more is going on. In daily life, a regular person keeps an eye on things so as not to be taken advantage of. People do not need arcane knowledge to adopt that attitude toward politics – it is simply common sense.

If this formulation is accurate, then there are severe limits to the political efficaciousness of creative citizenship. Lack of factual knowledge, suspiciousness of rigorous systems of reasoning, the feeling that the political system is ultimately knowable in roughly the same terms as everyday life will act as a brake on productive political participation (see Mason 2002).

At the heart of the Creative Citizens Research Plan is “the emergence of new forms of media and personal communication in the Web 2.0 environment, usually called ‘social networks’” (2012: 1). The projects that developed from this observation cover a range of activity, including digital media literacy and story-telling techniques, digital mapping and games applied to grass-roots participation in policy planning, activism, blogging and even near field communication (NFC) scanning of fabric art (Creative Citizens: The Conference Program 2014). The centrality of new media to a vision of a creative economy for the UK is also stated in the Nesta report that is one of the keystone documents for Creative Citizens. Its chapter on ‘creative technologies and markets’ concludes by observing that, “The momentum of the technological trajectories that are shaping the convoluted – even chaotic – landscape . . . is unlikely to abate in the years ahead. If anything, it is likely to accelerate” (Bakhshi, Hargreaves and Mateos-Garcia 2013: 42).

Despite the near-equivalence between a vision of creative citizenship and digital technologies, there is little sustained analysis of technology per se. Rather, digital technology seems mostly to be considered an instrument to be put to use in the sorts of projects mentioned above. Several unaddressed questions, at different levels of analysis, immediately come to mind: To what extent will today’s digital technology persist into the future, and how might it change? Is it reasonable to expect that users can significantly participate in the co-design (‘domestication’) of emerging new media, or will the range of possible uses and the practices of usage be largely built-in, becoming an example of weak technological determinism? If so, who will decide the design, and according to what criteria? Should a view of new media focus on individual devices or take a more systemic perspective? What are the limits to new media’s potential contributions to creative citizenship? Is the stress on new media a potential problem in the conception and realization of creative citizenship?

To illustrate how aspects of digital media technology might present a challenge, if not an obstacle, to a creative citizenship, take the question regarding devices and systems of new media (this discussion draws on Miller 2014a, in press, 2014c). One sense of emerging media is that they are becoming less discrete objects providing dedicated services and more functionalities (audio, video, text) that are dispersed in built environments. The internet of things is an increasingly common way of expressing this notion, but so too are smart (and conscious) homes, intelligent environments and wearables. A world of media functionalities embedded in non-media objects, surfaces and structures implies near-continuous interfaces that can be accessed through natural means like speech and gesture, or even automatically. Digitally enhanced environments will gain the capacity not only to respond, but to learn and anticipate people’s behavior. Engaging with media will be experienced as augmentation, not mere use. Just what constitutes a medium will be open to question.

This speculation is not idle; numerous researchers and corporations agree on its likelihood. And there are physical sites where a version of this pattern of development can be charted historically. The automobile is one. Expensive, unreliable, big AM radios were added awkwardly to cars in the early twenties. During the post-war period, cars steadily became a place where a variety of media were integrated into their design, and unexpectedly the car became a treasured opportunity for media consumption. These days, the automobile has become thoroughly digitalized, with micro-computers governing the car’s operation, supplementing the driver, altering performance and exchanging various kinds of information with networks. Digital technology has even supplanted the human driver in experiments in autonomous cars.

The experience of media in today’s automobiles is mixed: much goes on outside the occupants’ knowing. In other ways, people touch screens, connect their smartphones, key-in information – taking active, conscious steps to engage with their car’s media. Few would doubt that digital media are now inextricably a part of the definition of the automobile. Which is hardly an obvious historical outcome, since the horseless carriage was intended to be above all else a transportation vehicle.

The automobile industry conducts considerable research on the design of cars’ new media interfaces (remembering that ‘media’ here means infotainment but also digital infrastructure). The Volkswagen Group of American Electronics Research Laboratory (vwerl.com) in Silicon Valley collaborates with the MIT Media Lab, for example. Much about an interface is relational. Its design is meant to signal what the medium can do and provide the means to use it. User Experience (UX) interface design stresses ease and naturalness and may even have an intentional emotional component, making the medium seem to be empathetic or at least not intimidating. This thinking can be seen in automobile interface design that substitutes speech commands and responses or finger swipes for turning knobs or pushing keys. Since the driver’s attention is principally on the task of driving, these considerations are more than aesthetic.

What might this view of media technology’s near-term future suggest for the realization of creative citizens? A mediatized world of natural, continuous interfaces might, on the one hand, make media literacy unnecessary. The ubiquity of media functionalities would give them the feel of electricity, hardly something that requires much attention or special effort (Pew 2014). Big-data bases and intelligent environments might be capable of remarkable personalization, including anticipating desires and mood setting according to an individual’s preferences. These qualities invoke Marshall McLuhan’s remark that fish would be the last to discover water.

Such a future could make distant politics more intimate, inviting an easy democratic collaboration. Or the simulations and parasocial intimacies of today’s politics might grow by orders of magnitude, creating a sort of digital false consciousness, or at least an alternative world (‘second life’) with little direct connection to the actual play of political power. In this way, creativity could be invited, pleasing and relatively effortless, but without serious political consequences.

Creativity in digital media terms of the kind advanced by the Creative Citizen projects may also have an historically brief value, perhaps relevant mostly to a technologically intermediate period of portable devices (‘Web 2.0’), between the first major era of digitalization and whatever comes next, possibly something more decentralized, embedded and natural-seeming. In fact, there is a feeling of the past to blogging and grassroots urban planning, for instance, not the future. So-called citizen journalists are not unlike the partisan activist writers of earlier times (Carey 1982). The New Journalism revolt against mainstream objectivity took place in the sixties and seventies (Wolfe 1973). Top-down urban planning and renewal were long ago criticized for their elitist nature (Jacobs 1961). With creativity so broadly and elusively defined, with this sense of déjà vu and with a quite different digital world on the horizon, these projects may be less politically empowering than they seem.