Youth and Media Response #9 – Civic Participation and Net Neutrality

In his essay, “Changing Citizenship in the Digital Age,” W Lance Bennett discusses the civic participation of youth through digital media. Defining youth as individuals roughly between the ages of 15 and 25, Bennett distinguishes between the two paradigms of youth engagement: the engaged youth and the disengaged youth. The former consist of youth who are unsatisfied with traditional means of political activism and find little value in dated forms of communication media, such as newspapers. Instead, they prefer to use peer-to-peer networks and online communities as their primary means of fair and equitable communication. To the engaged youth, political empowerment is achieved through new media and technology. The disengaged youth, on the other hand, still value traditional means of political involvement and media. More concern is put into voting and other methods of participating in the public sphere—and to them, it is the emphasis on the public sphere that differentiates civic engagement with media engagement. Civic engagement is essentially involves public political action, while media engagement may not. The internet, for example, is often used as an individualistic means of political participation, but does not necessarily promote the “civic.” Nonetheless, the internet plays an important role for both paradigms. As an open source for any voice to be heard, it is an efficient way of informing yourself and others on nearly any topic, political or not. It is a free and neutral medium (i.e. there is little to no censorship). Recently, some concern over net neutrality has come up. There have been speculations that internet service providers may eventually limit the sites that the average user can visit—charging more for the less visited sites (not unlike the cable TV system). This would affect both the engaged and the disengaged youth, since information would be limited and smaller sites would virtually fade away. Bloggers would lose visitors and only the empowered would be heard.

Political actions have been taken by youth to inform people online. Perhaps one of the most popular sources for internet activism on net neutrality comes from IPower on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t89WwcsOj9U&feature=channel

With over 1 700 000 views, this goes to show that the internet is a significant tool for informing people on political issues. What interests me about the piece is that, with the girl, Tania, as their mascot, it is clear that they are using her… voluptuousness to capture viewers eyes (presumably male). A channel of videos have spun off from her popularity where she doesn’t really talk about political issues, so much as the ins and outs of courtship. Regardless, seeing as the internet is a significant part of civic participation in youth, it is only natural for youth to rise up and protest against the compromise of net neutrality.

If you are interested, here is another video by the same people on net neutrality:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2XPiqhN_Ns