Social media, design and creative citizenship: an introduction

ABSTRACT

This article serves as an introduction to a special issue of the journal Digital Creativity, which addresses the challenges, potentials and meaning of different creative forms of citizenship enacted through social media. The articles in this special issue paint a complex picture of the expressions and meaning and citizenship. This introduction aims to provide a wider context for the contributions to this special issue by reviewing some of the claims made for the creative civic potential of social media and identifying a number of issues and questions that might inform analyses of the subject.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• creative citizenship
• design
• participation
• community
• digital networks

Introduction

The meaning of citizenship has moved beyond the idea of people’s engagement with voting, party membership, petitioning representatives, picketing government buildings or other such forms of traditional mainstream politics. Citizenship is now used to describe many types of creative practices taken up by a wide variety of actors such as social movement activists, sports fans, crafters, documentary filmmakers and indigenous community members. The active construction of citizenship through social media has many facets and has been the subject of compelling critical analysis. Scholars are, for example, examining the explicit role of ‘selfie culture’ in expressions of dissent and resistance (Kuntsman 2017); the transformative potential of digitally mediated practices of ‘critical making’ by DIY enthusiasts (Ratto and Boler 2014); the tapping into new forms of communication such as spreadable videos and memes by youth, remixing popular cultural expressions and seeking to bring about political change—by any media necessary (Jenkins et al. 2016); and the surveillance practices of citizens in the aftermath of the Snowden leaks (Hintz, Dencik, and Wahl-Jorgensen 2017). This special issue aims to explore the role of social media in the articulation of creative citizenship among communities connected through digital networked technologies. It brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines, including media studies, design, law, health and indigenous education. The contributions address the challenges, potentials and meaning of different creative forms of citizenship enacted through the use of social media.

The articles describe and analyse acts—such as fan participation in Twitter campaigns of sporting events, the sharing of old homeland photos on Facebook, online music-making and -sharing, the spreading of documentary films on social media and the design of community media resources. The concept of creative citizenship can be employed as a way of considering how ‘everyday creative acts’ can generate community engagement (Zamenopoulos et al. 2016). It points to the need to go beyond individual approaches, or ‘networked individualism’ (Rainie and Wellman 2012) to investigate the creative potential and uses of social media within a logic of collective or ‘connective action’ (Bennett and Segerberg 2012). What meaning can we make of the diverse claims for citizenship that is said to be accompanying the advent of social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube? Can creative citizenship serve as a way of examining how social media can serve as medium, tool and context for enabling everyday people to intervene in systems of authority and power? How can we understand everyday creativity on social media as a civic resource that enhances the capacity of communities to enact change?

The creative practices of people with social media cannot be fully understood in isolation from the contexts within which they are situated. The articles in this issue deal with contexts and communities such as Olympics fans from all over the globe on Twitter, Turks sharing old photos on Facebook and American activists making and spreading videos on social media. Through their creative acts, they take up a variety of roles in these different contexts, as consumers, co-designers, creative professionals and community members.

This special issue is intended to provide an opportunity for a grounded and contextualized exploration of the potential of social media for creative citizenship. My objective in this introduction is to provide a wider context for the contributions to this special issue by reviewing some of the claims made for the creative civic potential of social media and identifying a number of issues and questions that might inform analyses of the subject.

Creative citizenship

The concept of creative citizenship has been discussed in a variety of disciplines such as political communication, management studies, media studies, cultural studies and history. Citizenship has been previously discussed in relation to the activities of audiences of television, radio and newspapers. In this regard, John Hartley (1999), for example, coined the idea of ‘media citizenship’, which he defined as a combination of audiencehood practices (such as fandom) and identity politics in commercial and mediated democracies. Media citizenship can be seen as constitutive part of another notion proposed by Miller (2006), ‘cultural citizenship’, which is about the freedom to participate in culture.

With the advent of social media, attention is increasingly being placed on the potentials of mediated representations, user-created content, digitally mediated social networks and communities. In this regard, scholars have begun considering notions such as ‘vernacular creativity’ (Burgess 2006), ‘silly citizenship’ (Hartley 2010), ‘participatory culture’ (Jenkins 2006), ‘DIY citizenship’ (Ratto and Boler 2014) and ‘selfies citizenship’ (Kuntsman 2017). The context that underlies these discussions is one where, on the one hand, there is a noted disengagement from the industrial-era technologies of democracy (voting, party membership), and a simultaneous rapid uptake of ‘new’ digital, mobile and social media, on the other. Thus, accusations of ‘civic apathy’ by proponents of traditional notions of democratic activity might be rebutted by pointing to the exponential growth of participation by these same people on social media. They are developing new civic identities out of the resources of entertainment media, private life, consumption and digital social networks (Hartley 2016).

In The Creative Citizen Unbound, Hargreaves and Hartley (2016) evoke the notion of creative citizenship as a way of understanding the potential of acts of creativity for individuals and communities within specific socio-political contexts. In the above-cited works, creative forms of citizenship are often associated with a range of phenomena varying from cultural activism and participation in the public sphere to everyday acts of creativity. They highlight a variety of creative and collaborative approaches to addressing civic challenges, which often involves the use of social media. Creative citizenship is associated with acts such as photo sharing, digital storytelling, sharing of sewing and knitting patterns online, graffiti art, urban gardening, cooking and community-led design. Ratto and Boler (2014) suggest that framing such activities as forms of citizenship signals the ways in which the individuals and groups that engage in them understand such activities as transformative. These creative acts serve as a means of challenging traditional hierarchies of authority and power often in ways not imagined by their initiators. In addition, they provide opportunities for understanding how power is leveraged through infrastructures, practices and institutions.

Creative citizenship, however, has been the site of both optimism and contestation. On the one hand, we have seen the emphasis being placed on the liberal individualism and the ‘semiotic self-determination’ (Hartley 1999) of the ‘creative consumer’ (Lessig 2004). Here, the creative citizen is seen as both a key to the new economy and as a major challenge to the dominance of societal institutions. On the other hand, are cautionary tales that warn against the rhetorics of liberal democracy and conceptions of the self that see individual choice as easily superseding realities of the digital divide, social hierarchies and power differentials.

Social media and networked technologies

Loader and Mercea (2011) argue that the malleability of social media enables new and innovative modes of social connectivity and cultural production that go beyond rational deliberative exchanges (Loader and Mercea 2011). Creative self-expression is experienced and performed through modalities of text, visual, audio and graphic communication forms. It is practised in different forms, varying from the playful repertoires of YouTube videos to chat and texting language, and the from selfie memes to hashtags.

In Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age, Castells (2015) outlines how different social movements such as the indignadas in Spain, the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings, and the Occupy Wall Street movement deploy networked communication to carve out new public spaces. He suggests that for these movements, such spaces are useful in creating a strong sense of community and collective identity. These spaces also serve as sites for generating new symbols, and for reconnecting with historical memories. In addition, these spaces constitute venues for testing out new rhetorics, models for debate, collaboration and collective action.

Zamenopoulos et al. (2016) draw on Sanders and Stappers (2008) typology of participant roles in co-creation, to propose different forms of creative practice in everyday life that social network technologies can make possible. These include acts of adaptation, making and creating. In this volume, we can see an example of creating when a design team develops ideas for designing communicative resources for the Wiradjuri indigenous community composed of collected materials from social networking sites, newspapers and radio broadcasts combined with designed posters and other printed materials. When citizens are on Facebook, acts of adaptation routinely occur, such as when members of a group are invited to share and comment on old photos of Turkey. Finally, we can see an act of making in the example where social justice activists make short documentary films and distribute them on social media.

Zamenopoulos et al. (2016) point out that such types of creative acts take their specific meaning in the context within which they are situated. Thus, the significance of these acts is determined by the purpose that drives them and the space in which they are expressed. These acts equally depend on the embedded resources such as the knowledge and skills of individuals, but also social relations, norms and shared ways of acting and collaborating in the specific social networks and communities in question.

Design

Design is often associated with a range of processes performed by design professionals with particular methods, by the facilitators of participatory process, and more generally, by people making change without formal design training (Light 2015). The concept of design has emerged as a master metaphor as the sign of expertise in a growth economy, where professional engineers make things work and designers make things desirable (Hartley 2016). We see creative industries increasingly integrating these values, as the design aspects of corporations such as Apple are given much of the credit for the commercial success of their products. Hartley (2016) observes that this ‘alpha’ version of design tends not to leave much room for users, beyond their role as consumers providing feedback. He notes further that the systems in which devices operated were often designed to restrict possibilities for users to exercise independent, creative, civic or collective action. This can be seen through the tendency to enforce the propriety rights of the corporation more strongly over the creative design rights of user communities.

However, many science and technology studies and feminist scholars, in respective ways, have emphasized the importance of the role that the ‘user’ and ‘social groups’ play in shaping the design and diffusion of technologies (Oudshoorn and Pinch 2005; cited in Loader and Mercea 2011). Fischer (2002) argues that we should perceive the relationship between the roles of consumer and designer as a continuum, rather than as being completely separated or distinct. He suggests that there is a continuum in these creative roles that can be placed on a trajectory from passive consumer, to active consumer, to end user, to user, to power user, to designer and to meta-designer. Within our own context, social media can provide ordinary citizens with the appropriate tools for navigating a variety of roles from consumer to producer/designer. In this regard, Loader and Mercea (2011) suggest that it is the openness of social media platforms that facilitates the potential of individuals and groups to become the source of innovative civic practices.

In this special issue, we attempt to propose an expansive notion of the term ‘design’ in a broad perspective, to acknowledge the different ways in which citizens may create artifacts to share, and invent ways of communicating, doing and being in communities, which is often linked to their participation in communities. We emphasize the variety and innovation shown in the ways citizens use digital technologies, singly or collectively, build social networks, spread communication and drive social action.

The contributions

The foregoing issues outlined above provide the contexts to the articles in this special issue. They represent an attempt to investigate how processes of creative civic engagement with social media play out in concrete situations. In the opening article, Katerina Girginova analyses audience participation in a social media campaign organized in connection with the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games. The #savethesurprise Twitter campaign organized by the London Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG) successfully encouraged two live dress rehearsal audiences of over 100,000 spectators to generate buzz about the ceremony on Twitter, while keeping the details of its contents a secret. She proposes the concept of architectures of participation as an analytical framework for understanding the ways in which the organizers planned for audience participation in the #savethesurprise campaign, as well as the ways in which the social media audiences themselves participated on Twitter. These architectures of participation (AoP) consist of legal, the technical and the social layers. Twitter played a key role in providing a technological platform for audience participation. Most importantly, digital audience practices contributed in making #savethesurprise not only a viral hit but also a global event. These digital audience practices, the author argues, represented a significant manifestation of creative citizenship. Participation on social media, however, was also governed by a legal framework put in place by the organizers of the event.

As I have noted above, social media is increasingly being placed at the forefront of creative expressions of social movement activism. Much like Occupy, social movements formed in protest against racialized police violence in the US have generated new political symbols, tactics and frames (Jenkins et al. 2016). Gino Canella presents a case study of two short-form documentary projects involving social movement activists. Drawing on experiences from participating in these two projects in combined roles as a researcher and an activist filmmaker, Canella discusses the media-making and social media distribution strategies of grassroots campaigns of social and economic justice. He shows how the documentaries produced as part of these campaigns make use of personal narratives to generate public engagement on social media and to mobilize viewers to participate in on-the-ground activities such as community meetings and public demonstrations. The article considers collaboration and participation as a ‘co-creative’ Do-it-With-Others process that constitutes a redefinition of the historical role of the documentary film genre in the public sphere, as an open space for dialogue and a stage for performing citizenship.

In discussions on citizenship, the importance of connecting what people do online to on the ground action is often emphasized. However, might the ability to retract away from one’s immediate real-world community to pursue action in online social networks also constitute a means of resistance? This is one of the questions Sam Cleeve explores in his article that looks at online music-making and -sharing practices of Iranian musicians. Informal networked communities formed around websites and blogs represented one of the few feasible ways by which Iranian popular musicians could make their music available to audiences outside Iran, both in the Iranian diaspora and non-Iranians. These practices resonate well with the notion of ‘networked individualism’ (Castells 2001; Wellman 2002), which underlines the role of highly personalized digitally mediated social networks as an important dimension of creative citizenship. Cleeve suggests that it is the fact that Iranian online music-sharing communities exist as temporary collections of networked individuals, as opposed to cohesive, permanent communities, which makes it possible for them to evade government control.

Özlem Savas’ article focuses on Facebook communities that collect and share old photos of Turkey. She sees creative citizenship being manifested in the active participation of the Facebook group members, through exchanging old photos. The discussions that these old photos help generate provide an opportunity for members of these groups to share personal knowledge, memories, testimonies, life stories and political opinions. These groups contribute in generating new types of knowledge, memory and representations of the past. Savas argues that this collaborative and participatory memory work of these Facebook communities renders representations of the past more visible, fluid and accessible. They generate a different type of public memory, one that challenges conventional, authoritative and institutionalized historical discourses of Turkey.

The final article by Yoko Akama, Deborah Evans, Seth Keen, Faye McMillan, Mark McMillan and Peter West links media and participation more closely with issues of design. The article describes the co-design of what the authors call ‘digital creative scaffolds’ with and for the Wiradjuri indigenous community in Australia. The digital and creative scaffolds consisted of an assemblage of materials taken from social media, websites, radio broadcasts, as well as other digital and print media materials that were designed for the specific purpose. The authors argue that these digital and creative scaffolds create arenas for action and spaces that gather together bodies, materials, affect and ideas for a shared connection to place, and for creating relationships. They suggest that these assembled materials can enable the Wiradjuri to articulate their sovereignty and form a political identity. The materials were also meant to help create new spaces for participants to create a stronger sense of community.

Conclusion

The mobilization of social media by citizens might be understood as a techno-social practice that embodies not only new forms of agency, but also new forms of governance and control, in a context of large-scale dataization (Kuntsman 2017). This points to the need for taking into account power, context, actions, effects and consequences. The contributions in this special issue portray creative citizenship on social media platforms as contested and contextual practices. They propose a set of critical questions that move beyond simplistic arguments of the social media user and citizen either as inherently politically transformative agent, or as the object of new forms of governance and institutional dominance. Contributors in this special issue ask questions such as: how can the creative practice online music-making by Iranian artists represent, at the same time, an escape from civic life at home and resistance to institutions of cultural oppression? How do fans develop feelings of national belonging even while participating in social media campaigns linked to globalized and highly commercialized sporting events? The answers to such questions help us identify instances of citizenship manifested through different modalities and materialities. The accounts of creative practices formed within a social media landscape that the articles in this special issue provide paint a complex picture of the expressions and meaning and citizenship. By examining the contexts and conditions which creative uses of social media mobilizes political action, connects communities and expresses identities, this special issue is an invitation to understand the possible meanings and articulations of citizenship at this particular conjuncture.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Henry Mainsah is a Marie Curie scholar at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick. He holds a PhD in Media and Communication from the University of Oslo.