by Nick Troiano
July 7, 2009
While there remains a vibrant debate over whether social media is creating new activists or just enhancing the tools used by existing ones, it is clear there has been a fundamental change in the way citizens are interacting with each other and organizations. This was a central topic last week at the Personal Democracy Forum, an annual conference that explores the intersection of technology and politics. Social media has drastically decreased the barriers of entry for citizens to have their voices heard and to take action on an issue. While the average citizen might not be transformed from Couch Potato to Code Pink overnight after hopping on Twitter or Facebook, he or she is able to easily take small, simple actions without much effort. Taken together, this can have an extraordinary impact, as we have seen again and again, most recently following the Iranian Elections. This civic crowdsourcing is the new model of citizen participation in the 21st Century, bringing more people into the political process than ever before, particularly within previously untapped demographics. Gone are the days in which tasks were, often by necessity, delegated and completed by a relatively small group of people in a hierarchal fashion. Successful organizations are those that will adopt and build off the new model. An advocacy group on immigration reform present at the conference explained that it is using new methods to engage its target audience, which is low on the socioeconomic scale. While they might not have Internet or even a computer, most have a cell phone. Thus, text–messaging campaigns are used to gather signatures for petitions, notify people of protest locations and spread other important messages. The cost of participation to each person is very low, but the effectiveness of tens of thousands of people sending a digital letter to Congress is very high. ActBlue, a political action committee, recently integrated with Twitter to ramp up political donations on the microblogging site, 140 characters and $5–10 at a time. SeeClickFix is an emerging online tool that is charting new territories in the field of micro–volunteerism by allowing people to geo–tag issues they see in their community, such as littering, and work towards resolving them. These and other organizations focus on the least common denominator, requiring a small buy–in from participants while providing an opportunity for them to scale their efforts at their own desire. The conference also revealed that creating a community in which each person has a stake and can interact with others is important to engaging people. Organizations and platforms that offer participants friendly competition (i.e. earning “political capital” at WhiteHouse2.org) or a chance to set the agenda and vision (i.e. ranking priorities at Change.org) are capitalizing on the social nature of citizens today. Organizations that seek to engage Citizen 2.0 should have the same characteristics: open–source, highly collaborative and impact–oriented. In sum, social media and networking are the keystones to the bridge between the 20th Century activist and the 21st Century citizen, and vital in sustaining our collective civic engagement in the long–term. The writer is an undergraduate student at Georgetown University and Co–Founder of myImpact.org.