Civic Engagement in Physical & Digital Public Space Sarah Mawdsley

Civic Engagement

in Physical and Digital Public Space

Sarah Mawdsley M.S. UP

On June 2, 2020, over 28 million Instagram accounts posted a black square for #BlackoutTuesday as an act of solidarity with ongoing protests against police violence in the wake of George Floyd’s murder (Monckton 2020). Throughout the summer, the Black Lives Matter Movement gained traction like never before by protesting not just in a physical public space but in a digital public space as well.

Since the Greek Agora, public space has played a key role in the development of cities. They offer citizens places to meet and engage in meaningful discussion (Carmona et al. 2008). Around the world we have seen people from all walks of life come together in these spaces and use them to protest. People protest against their oppressive governments, against their political leaders for not doing enough to prevent climate change, against police violence, and march for their basic human rights. The rise of social media activism has led to a new way of protesting that can draw more attention to a movement, and involve people from all around the world that support the movement but could not otherwise be able to attend protests in person. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and now TikTok are reshaping how we amplify our voices and make change; these channels give ordinary people power beyond the public space as we have known previously. Social media platforms offer a complementary approach to civic engagement that can make involvement in protests and movements more accessible, and, thus, create a bigger impact. At physical protests, crowds often show up and march, waving their homemade picket signs, or participate in boycotts and sit-ins. People will echo chants and give speeches. Other times they will be silent. Despite what the media may have us believe, there is no wrong way to protest. At the end of the day, it is about being heard. Above all else, the significance of the place is the make or break feature of a protest. In Los Angeles, for example, low density has led to protests taking place on highways rather than in the city itself, because they block traffic and force people to acknowledge what is going on (Schwartzstein 2020).

Social media offers us a new way of looking at the significance of place. With something as simple as a hashtag or mention, a small group, or even just one person, no matter where they are in the world can start a movement. In the summer of 2020, I watched social media accounts shift to be more civically active; sharing information and graphics from activists and writing captions that declared their political beliefs. I saw celebrities like Olympic Steeplechaser Colleen Quigley share their accounts with people of color for the day, to share their story with a different audience in “Pass the Mic” campaigns. It was inspiring to witness – social media giving rise to a new age of political and social activism. In 2011, when Occupy Wall Street protests began in New York, organizers turned to Facebook and Twitter to raise awareness of the events and direct people to demonstrations. The hashtag #OccupyWallStreet, aided in the scaling of the protests, turning it into a national series of demonstrations (Tremayne 2013). People have been using social media platforms as a public space since the beginning of the digital age, but it has advanced significantly in the past decade; no longer used solely to provide information about active demonstrations, but as a stand alone protest itself, as we saw on June 2, 2020.

With the rise of social media, we begin to notice the flaws of its imperfect system. For every post demanding change there is an “if you don’t like what I’m doing, unfollow me” post. And that’s what most people did. They unfollowed, blocked, and reported accounts that didn’t align with their beliefs. They created bubbles of their own bias and minimized their opportunities to have meaningful conversations with people that hold conflicting views. In the physical space, the ‘real world,’ this is not the case. You cannot block someone or mute things because you don’t agree with them. That is why we protest: to have these difficult conversations and do something about injustice. Another issue surrounding digital activism is the violent spread of misinformation. We all have relatives on Facebook that share everything, whether it’s true or not, solely because it aligns with what they want to believe. You swear that if they weren’t family you’d probably unfriend them, or maybe you did. But the truth is, whether fact or fiction, news travels just as fast. While platforms like Instagram and Twitter have fact checkers for information surrounding elections or COVID-19, they can’t catch everything. It falls on individual users to be conscious of what they are sharing and recognize the potential bias of the person behind the original post. Misinformation, however, is not just a result of social media. Since the beginning of human history people have spread rumors and manipulated the truth. Where it was once contained to a more local level, we are seeing social media digitally spread information, real or fake, at a global scale, which leads to hate and bigotry across the physical realm. When this hate spills out into the ‘real world,’ it is government’s responsibility to regulate the situation. But online, the government has very little control. Accountability lies in the hands of the private companies who own these social media platforms. Every citizen of the United States is granted the freedom of speech and the freedom of assembly under the First Amendment of the Constitution, yet Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms hold the power to remove accounts that don’t abide by the terms and conditions set forth by the company. The question is: should private companies that operate in digital public spaces have the authority to sensor users?

Public space, by definition, is a democratic space where citizens can interact, share ideas, and discuss issues (Charkrabarti & Gladstone 2017). For centuries, we have only thought about public space as a physical space. In the age of social media and the new ‘digital reality’ created by the Covid-19 pandemic, protests are able to break free of that limited philosophy and engage with a new form of civic space. Our newfound online public space is not without problems. The well-intentioned #BlackoutTuesday protest last year was actually harmful to the Black Lives Matter Movement. Those 28 million posts overwhelmed the Black Lives Matter tag and blocked information about the movement and local protests from circulating. Digital public space is not perfect. Then again, neither is the physical one. Digital platforms do however make protests more accessible. The two realms compliment each other, by increasing awareness, challenging mental models, and involving more people in the civic process.

Sarah is a first year urban planning student with a dual concentrations in international planning and the built environment. She actively fights for racial and social justice and is a climate change activist using both Instagram and Twitter to advocate for change.