1. Generational attitudes: Up through the 60’s most Americans, by necessity, had a different attitude around civic obligation. The Depression and World War II in this century was a common hardship that bonded people together to fight/endure.

As someone born in the 60’s, I realize how lucky I am to have grown up with so much freedom. But without a common hardship or “enemy” there’s less incentive to bond with my community to deal with problems. I’m definitely guilty of sitting in my house and letting other people deal with the problem.

2. Changes in what engages people. Like it or not, people have shorter attention spans. You can blame it on computers or on MTV or whatever. It doesn’t matter. My feeling is: to engage people you have to give them information at a level that’s pretty effortless. If we could educate and engage people on civic issues using computer games, comic books, and reality shows, I’m all for it.

The point is not to trivialize these issues by the delivery methods but to find ways to encourage people to take action in ways that work for them.

Glad you’re writing about this, Amy. The election rhetoric is making it excruciatingly clear how desperate we need to ways to get people involved beyond gut level nastiness.

Judy

To clarify,my goal here is not to write a formal academic “paper” — I’m no academic, and I loathe academic writing I envision it to be more like a long-ish essay with resources and examples.

- Amy Gahran

Actually, one really interesting part about the Knight Commission’s effort is that it doesn’t actually require that journalists or professional news organizations be involved in “civic media” or “civic info” at all! They’re just looking at the larger issue of what kind of info do communities need in our democracy.

That particular lack of assumption is one key reason why I find this effort so intriguing.

More later,

- Amy

Under Human Nature, you are talking about obstacles to participation - we should also look at the willingness to participate. And the paper should detail this part: “developing civic information systems that work with human nature” … the whole idea is how to achieve this. And, how can we get this idea into Politician’s minds.

-Anand.

Essentially, you’re arguing that journalism is floundering not just because of business models, but because public life is floundering. When baseball players went on strike, newspaper circulation fell. That’s not a problem with journalism — it’s a demand problem. And as you point out, not demanding news about civic life has serious consequences for quality of life. But it’s easy to lose the connection to community and public life given our current models of participation and information.

Cole Campbell used to say that when people claimed the public is apathetic, he always substituted the word “alienated.” That makes it a different problem. Web 2.0 technologies, citizen journalism, interactivity, etc. aren’t going to make people who are alienated necessarily more civically minded. But used in conjunction with a re-oriented journalism, one that moves beyond transmission of information to engagement in public problem solving, these tools could make a difference in reducing the barriers to participation that you identify. If our mission is to deliberately facilitate public engagement, and not just deliver information, we will necessarily develop different roles, different practices, different methods and distribution.