In one of my orientation sessions for the Knight-Wallace Fellowship, we met with faculty and staff from one of the University of Michigan's many cross-cutting centers — the kind that pulls researchers and teachers together from departments that might not otherwise talk to each other. I had a chance to ask a question relevant to my research project: do they try to inculcate civic engagement in their students, and if so, how?
Two different people jumped in to answer. Both answered with voting.
That struck me for two reasons. They came at it from different fields, and they converged on the same thing anyway. And I had prefaced the question with examples — attending a city council meeting, learning how to submit a FOIA request — that had nothing to do with elections.
I think this is actually pretty common and understandable: when many people hear "civic engagement," they think about elections.
Call me crazy, but I want to fix this. More accurately, I want to broaden what people think of when they hear this term, "civic engagement."
How I define ‘civic engagement'
So, what do I mean? What else is there, besides voting?
A lot, actually.
There is civic associational life. This is clubs and interest groups, whether Rotary or the local gun and rod club. Organizations with a regular meeting schedule, officers, and a mission or function that everyone rallies around.
There is professional associational life, too. This is local contractors' councils, or the county bar association, or the board of realtors, or a union, or any group defined by a trade, professional service, or occupation.
There's quasi-governmental civic life. Neighborhood associations, PTA, HOA, etc.
Faith is a part of civic engagement, if you're a regular attendee or a member of a congregation. Many churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples also spawn further civic engagement that extends into their host communities.
Volunteerism.
Libraries.
Even using parks.
Shopping is civic engagement — except e-commerce is not. Main street shops, garage sales, patronizing local businesses is civic engagement in the fact that it connects us directly with the local economy and the people powering it. Amazon and Wal-Mart's website do not.
Attending local government meetings, but also responding to surveys your city sends out.
Going to a high school football game, a graduation, or a school science fair.
Attending a parade.
Museums, theater, festivals. Going to the movies (instead of just streaming at home), I consider civic engagement.
Participating in a competition, a tournament, or contest — think startup pitch-fest events, Scrabble contests, chili cook-offs, and such.
Attending birthday parties, retirement celebrations, graduation parties, bar/bat mitzvahs, quinceañeras, picnics, block parties. This is civic engagement, too.
Stated more generally: I'm interested in the hours of our lives that fall outside the obligations of work and outside the walls of our homes — unless we've opened those walls and invited neighbors, or strangers, in. That's the space I want to fill with more of the above.
Almost none of it is voting.
Why this is a journalism problem
How journalists define "civic engagement" is a statement about what they believe journalism is for. If we delineate it as "voting and all the electoral trappings," then journalism's function is election news, public meeting coverage, accountability reporting, and watchdog investigations. I want that work done, and done well. But notice who is hiring us for it: mostly the people who already follow government. Put another way, it's the audience we already have.
I want to emphasize this distinction: My broader definition of civic engagement doesn't just potentially add more readers to a news org's audience. It changes what "done" looks like for the job. If the parade and the county bar association and the middle school science fair are civic life, then helping 40 people “find their people” on a Saturday night isn't filler between the real news stories, or a lesser form of work than real reporting. It is the work.
My intuition — what I'm trying to suss out through this fellowship — is that the people who spend Saturday with their neighbors are far more likely to care what the city commission is up to on Tuesday than the people who stayed home streaming. And it won't be because we “got them into our funnel” and “converted” them into hard news readers. It'll be because socializing breeds curiosity, and the stake we grow in a place by being out in it sparks a need to know.
So I worry we've been working from a too-closely cropped picture of what civic engagement is. And I worry about what is filling the space the picture leaves out. More and more of those hours outside of work seem to be spent at home, alone or nearly so, in company we can turn off.
I don't think the problem is that what we do at home is frivolous. Plenty of what's on my list up there is frivolous. The problem is that it doesn't require anybody else to show up.
More word salad
Reid Williams
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