Civic Engagement in the Digital Age

Written November 9, 2020

Civic engagement is one of those things most of us don’t think much about. We may not even consider much of what it is. To be sure we are clear, it does mean being involved in politics, because it means you are engaging with your government. Using this term often brings the assumption of use on a local level, but it is also true on the state and national levels. 

Traditionally, being civically engaged in the US has meant, of course, voting. That is likely your first thought. But there is much more involved than just voting. It can mean writing your Congress people, both on the national and state level, to express how you want them to represent you regarding particular issues. It can mean going to a city council meeting to express your concerns about something. It is, by definition, a process by which people take collective action to address issues of public concern. So this even expands to volunteer activities, whether that is supporting a candidate or fundraising, and protest activities including petitions, boycotts, and marches.

If this is the definition, people have been engaging civically quite a bit this year. But how is that impacted by social media? Well for one, a great deal of planning happens on social media. It has expanded the way we communicate, so something like nationwide, or even worldwide protests are possible because we have the kind of communication structure that makes it possible.

But social media has also affected how we interact with elected officials and representatives. Nearly everyone elected to office is on at least Twitter and Facebook, if not other platforms as well. This has an effect on both sides of the aisle as well. Trump is nearly constantly on Twitter, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has used Twitter, and other platforms to great effect as well. Social media has become a way we can express our opinions and communicate with elected officials, though it can seem easy to get lost in the roar if you are responding to a tweet or commenting on a post somewhere. It can be difficult to tell how much these officials pay attention to what people say on these accounts too.

The part of civic engagement that does not always come across so well on social media is understanding actual legislation. The danger of bad information is high here. Legislation can be written in complex language and a slog to read through on your own, let alone fully understand. But groups explaining it can far too easily misrepresent what it is meant to be. We need to be able to agree upon a reliable, unbiased source for accurate information on these kinds of things, and we need to be able to more easily research these things so we know what laws we are voting for. The flip side of this is that we need to increase civic engagement enough that a majority of people will really make the effort to research their laws.

There also seems to be a need for better civic engagement on local and state levels. Some of this can come from people holding elected offices, but some of this can come from a higher interaction of citizens as well. 

In the end, to get better civic engagement in both quality and quantity, we need to have citizens that are interested in that kind of engagement, willing to educate themselves on the issues at hand, and to listen to those with expertise on those issues. We also need elected officials and people running government agencies and institutions to not only regain the trust of the citizens, but actively engage them on social media and show they are listening to what people are actually saying. An improvement in civic engagement could lead to a government more responsive to people’s needs, and more stable in its ability to fulfill those needs.