Our Co-Chairs Steven L. Johnson and Matthew Gillikin contributed a short essay to a collection called Digital Democracy from Below: Resisting AI and Techno-solutionism, which emerged out of a workshop held by UVA’s Digital Technology for Democracy Lab earlier this year. Their essay describes some of their experiences with engaging with digital technology in Livable Cville’s advocacy work and is shared below. You can read through the entire collection of essays here.
The Ubiquity and Limits of Digital Technology in Local Civic Engagement
The iconic 1943 Norman Rockwell painting, Freedom of Speech depicts an idealized moment of participatory democracy in the United States: a working-class man speaking out at an annual town budget meeting, capturing the attention of well-dressed audience members sitting nearby. While moments like these still exist in contemporary US politics, they are far less central in our digital age. Even here in Charlottesville—a city of ten square miles and about 50,000 residents—local civic engagement is strongly shaped by global digital communication platforms. Despite being a politically active community by most measures, the average city resident finds it difficult to know when and how to effectively voice their opinions about city affairs. The building blocks of local advocacy—finding information about when, where, and how to voice your opinions; connecting with others to amplify your voice; and mobilizing community members to action—are all complicated by the reliance on digital technology as a ubiquitous method of communication.
Digital technology shapes how to find information.
Before speaking in person at a town budget meeting, a concerned resident needs to find out where, when, and how to make a public comment. When seeking to weigh in on a topic they care about—such as school funding, sidewalk gaps, or public safety—it can be challenging to identify the proper landing spot for an email or phone call. Decades ago, when city government approached controversial decisions, most people could count on one or more local news outlets—newspapers, TV, radio, and alt-weeklies—to keep interested residents informed. As local news has been hollowed out by the transition from local advertising-supported news sources to global digital advertising platforms, basic information about opportunities for effective civic engagement has become hard to find.
One source of information is local government websites. However, municipalities facing the daunting challenge of creating and maintaining public-facing websites, typically turn to content management systems (CMS) available from a handful of technology vendors. Across the diverse set of information a locality presents to the public, specific items like meeting agendas, budget documents, and key reports are, in our experience, exceedingly difficult to locate.
Another source of information is advocacy groups like Livable Cville, the all-volunteer organization we co-chair. Yet, even our committed volunteers interested in land use, mobility, and climate action find it hard to stay up-to-date on what is happening in local government, often falling back on direct communication with city leaders and staff to ensure we are understanding issues, timelines, and logistics correctly before messaging a larger audience. In other words, it often requires working around technology to gather accurate information.
Digital technology shapes how to organize and advocate
Effective local organizing has always relied on making personal connections. Whereas decades ago, there were more formal civic organizations and informal third places to engage with friends, co-workers, and neighbors, today many people both expect and welcome communication via digital technology—through websites, email-based newsletters, social media, and messaging apps. These platforms enable lower-cost mass communication, yet come with real limitations.
Even a simple email-based newsletter requires a mailing list with subscribe and unsubscribe options. Whether or not an intended recipient sees an email—even one they explicitly opted-into—is at the mercy of email providers spam and prioritization filters. Similar barriers exist on social media channels and text messaging services—with the further collective action challenge of coalescing on a manageable number of platforms among the many options where your target audience may be found.
Even when organizers have information that is welcomed by interested residents, effectively communicating it is heavily influenced by global platforms optimized for virtual engagement, not for effective organizing. As the options for easily sharing information have increased, so too has the difficulty of cutting through a near-constant onslaught of digital information and stimuli to connect with our interested audience.
Digital technologies have made it easier than ever to communicate across barriers of time and space. As such, we would expect that technologic advances in the decades since the Rockwell painting would also reduce barriers to civic engagement. We contend, however, that due to how digital technology is currently integrated into society, it makes it harder to know where, when, and how to make a public comment. In this way, platforms can be viewed as often undermining, rather than supporting, local civic participation. Reclaiming local civic participation will require demanding more from the platforms mediating information discovery and dissemination.
