Why We Should Keep Studying Good (and Everyday) Participation: An Analogy to Political Participation

Abstract

Research on participation is currently characterized by a trend towards studying its “darker” sides. In this commentary, I make an argument for why we should keep studying good participation. In addition, I claim that the flipside of studying exceptional case studies of participation shouldn’t be only focusing on dark participation, but on everyday, mundane forms of participation, that may happen in surprising contexts (such as non-proprietary platforms) and may take different shapes. To make these claims, I introduce a case study of “good participation” in news production processes, and explain why it may merit this distinction. I then use a three-pronged analogy to the cognate field of political participation to show what it can tell us about good—and everyday—participation in the news.

AMEND: Open Source and Data-Driven Oversight of Water Quality in New England

“…The data journalism movement addresses how twenty-first century "data abundance, computational exploration, and algorithmic emphasis" (Lewis, 2015) manifest in the production and distribution of news (Coddington, 2015). The ability of individual advocates or small organizations to produce and publish reproduceable policy analysis based on public domain datasets can motivate and support journalistic inquiry (e.g., Section 4.5) and connects specifically to participatory and communalist journalism, whereby individual actors can contribute to the gathering, synthesis, and dissemination of news and information (Kligler-Vilenchik, 2018;Ruotsalainen & Villi, 2018). Optimistically, open source platforms such as AMEND can help to address the problem of consolidation of knowledge about the manipulation and distribution of news and content relevant to civic engagement among an "information elite" with control of proprietary media outlets and massive networks of followers (Robinson & Wang, 2018) and the differentiated capacity between resource-rich and poor organizations to pursue data journalism (Fink & Anderson, 2015).…”

News and Participation through and beyond Proprietary Platforms in an Age of Social Media

“…Altogether, this thematic issue stresses that diverse forms of public interaction taking place on the digital platforms of news media, as well as on non-proprietary social media platforms, are important for the epistemology of participatory journalism. The invited scientific commentaries authored by Katz (2018), Kligler-Vilenchik (2018), Novak (2018), and by Usher and Carlson (2018), each offers important contributions that synthesize the nexus of journalism and participation. Future research should look further into positive and dark participation across diverse platforms.…”