• In most European countries, public education systems were established in the early or mid 19^th century. Industrialization, urbanization, the need of nation states to foster nationalism and proper religious attitudes among its citizens, as well as the increased importance of literacy skills, were some of the political incentives behind this development. When schooling expanded, the basic assumptions about how teaching and learning should be organized were already in place (Lindensjö and Lundgren, 2000). There were teachers and students with specific entitlements and obligations. Teachers lectured and students listened and were obliged to follow what was said, but they were not expected to take initiatives or assert their own interests. The authority relationships were clear, and even the architecture and the design of the classroom reinforced this pattern of a practice intended for monological recitation and verbatim reproduction. The curriculum was stable, and the institution was in control of the information about the world that reached the pupils. There was little, if any, competition from alternative sources of knowledge such as printed or other media. Successful learning was the ability to perform well under these specific premises.
• The metaphorical construction of learning embedded in these institutional arrangements exert a considerable influence over how we now understand what education is and what it should be. Claims about how education should be organized and how its outcomes are to be assessed, thus, never merely reflect an objective reality deconstructed through analytical endeavours. On the contrary, they are grounded in traditions that have emerged during a long time, in this case over millennia. As the Russian philosopher of language V.N. Vološinov (1929, 1973) once remarked in a totally different context, language both refracts and shapes reality as we know it, and this is worth considering when debating the role and function of education in society and the nature of learning. The goals of education are complex and cannot be assessed through the use of simple performance measures. Instead, it is necessary to consider the consequences of the reflexivity that Giddens (1990) refers to as the double hermeneutics of knowledge about social life. This implies reflecting on how the discourses we currently employ for discussing such matters both shape our thinking about education and, simultaneously, co-determine the ways in which schooling is organized. Or, to borrow from another social theorist with an interest in reflexive relationships between discourses and institutional practices, we must treat discourses as “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (Foucault, 1972, p54).
• This view of language, as intrinsic to our “ways of world-making” (Goodman, 1978), is a productive perspective to employ when examining the consequences of what is referred to as the knowledge society for the future of schooling. Not surprisingly, the controversies surrounding education and schooling are deeply ideological. Schooling is an ideological project; it is about using collective resources to provide people with knowledge, skills and attitudes that are valued in society. As argued by Cuban (2004), one could go as far as to say that in symbolic and real terms debates about schooling over the past 200 years have served as “battlegrounds for solving national problems and working out differences in values” (p71).
• In current debates, influential stakeholders such as international organizations, high-profile researchers, politicians, employers and representatives of the media all participate in lively debates and prophecies where claims are made about how things ‘are’, and what the future of education is, and should be, under the pressure exercised by the demands of the so-called knowledge society. In such argumentation, certain features of the current situation are selected as pivotal; they are conceptualized and shaped by ideological interests, and, as a next step, formulated as elements of visions and policies. These visions and policies, in turn, themselves become part of the reality they describe in a reflexive process, and they will therefore be consequential in shaping the future.
• One example of such circularity can be found in the report “Schooling for tomorrow” published for the OECD (2000). The report begins with the identification of a number of trends, particularly focusing on the knowledge economy, social exclusion and a changing family and community life. It is, for instance, claimed that “schools ’structurally’ lie at the core of children’s activities, but other sources of interest and influence seem far more attractive and relevant for many” (p3), and that “growing individualism and social fragmentation bring their own problems for the young and for schools” (p4). With claims of this kind as starting points, six scenarios describing the future of schooling in 2020 are outlined by OECD analysts and ideologists. Two of the scenarios are held to “maintain status quo”, either by keeping what is described as a bureaucratic school system or through an exodus of teachers from the system. These options are characterized as inflexible and are claimed to be associated with maintaining and exacerbating inequalities and social exclusion. The scenario of a school as “focused learning organizations”, on the other hand, is described as being “revitalised around a strong knowledge agenda rather than a social agenda, in a culture of high quality experimentation, diversity and innovation” (p9). Thus, in this particular, and highly ideological, configuration of the world and the future of schooling, a “learning organization” is seen as in conflict with an institution which has “a social agenda” and which attends to the needs of those who, for some reason, do not fit into the knowledge economy.
• In such accounts, the compensatory and expansive functions of education are perceived as difficult to reconcile with the ambition of having a school with “a strong knowledge agenda”. If similar arguments had served as guiding principles regulating access to education in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, people with disabilities, ethnic and other minorities and those living in remote areas, would have been largely excluded, ie precisely the groups that have profited immensely from the expansion of education. And, of course, opening up education at all levels to girls – who now, in many countries, outperform boys in educational achievement – would not have been high on the agenda. Thus, education is part of the transformation of societies, and therefore the criteria of what constitutes successful education are complex. This is precisely why debates on education cannot be premised on linear extrapolations of what the present seems to require; rather, they need to include considerations of what we would like the future of society to be, and how education may contribute towards a number of different goals.

The role of schooling in preparing children and young people for citizenship at some stage must rest on an analysis of what are central skills and competences for active citizenship in a changing democratic society. In this context it is interesting to see that even for scholars, the implications of the transformations of the ways of learning and communicating that are linked to digital technologies are difficult to come to grips with. What is happening to our modes of developing and communicating knowledge in the wake of these technologies, and what are the basic competences required under such circumstances? One of these interesting debates concerns the differences between the nature of skills that are relevant for traditional print literacy and those that are assumed to be relevant for multimodal and networked information technologies. The opinions on this matter go in very different directions. Some argue that the use of technology might result in the loss of traditional skills, since it seems as though people “go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense” (Rowlands et al, 2008, p295). Others claim that traditional literacy skills are more central than ever, “as people need to critically scrutinize and scroll tremendous amounts of information, putting increasing emphasis on developing reading and writing abilities” (Kellner, 2004, p17). But there are also those who argue that this kind of scrolling, skimming and browsing is essentially the same kind of reading that we know from before, and that there is nothing really new in this.

While new types of literacy are associated with the capabilities of accessing and handling massive amounts of textual information, they are also connected to an increasing significance of images and other forms of mediated communication as was illustrated in the two scenarios at the beginning of this text. Jenkins and colleagues, for instance, define “21^st century literacy” as the overlap of aural, visual and digital literacy. A particular emphasis is put on “the ability to understand the power of images and sounds, to recognize and use that power, to manipulate and transform digital media, to distribute them pervasively, and to easily adapt them to new forms” (2005, p25). Kress (2004) argues that the current “rearrangement in the constellations of modes of representation and media of dissemination – from writing and book to image and screen – is having profound consequences for meaning making and hence for learning” (p16). In the literature we now find terms such as information, computer, media and multimedia literacy (Kress, 2003; Jewitt, 2006) as attempts to characterize these new competences. Literacy also increasingly takes the plural to signal the diversity of modes of expression of the current media ecology. In a similar vein, Brown makes a very specific argument about the future of literacy and predicts that “the real literacy of tomorrow entails the ability to be your own personal reference librarian – to know how to navigate through confusing, complex information spaces and feel comfortable doing so” (2000, p12).

• Although our task in this chapter is premised on ambitions that are similar to those of the OECD report, and this whole genre of visionary forecasts for what seems to be an increasingly unpredictable future, we wish to question the extent to which claims about a knowledge society provide sufficient and educationally relevant guidelines for attempting to transform education. To discuss these issues, we find it necessary also to reflect briefly on the language and the metaphors of the so-called knowledge society in which these discussions unfold. It is, in our opinion, important to avoid adopting too narrow and reductionist approaches to understanding the complex and culturally very significant issues of what learning is and what schools are for. One element to consider when reflecting on the future of schooling, thus, is to highlight some of the ideological underpinnings on which the alleged needs for reforming schools in one way or another are grounded. In the following, we first address some features of the discourse on the knowledge society and how it seems to lead us into characterizing the value of schooling primarily in its instrumental functions in relation to short-term economic goals. Following this, we will discuss the manner in which technology has become a central part of many young people’s lives outside school – and what this development might imply in terms of the necessity of schools to adapt to the lives of students rather than the other way around.

The knowledge society – metaphors, rhetoric and tensions

• In the discussions of the changes that many societies undergo, a plethora of terms, etiquettes and metaphors are in swing and they are part of the reflexivity characterizing our discussions. Some of these terms take their point of departure from the differences between our contemporary conditions of life and those that characterized agrarian and industrial societies; we are, for instance, said to live in a Post-modern, Post-Fordist, Post-industrial or Super-industrial society. In other characterizations, new technologies and technological breakthroughs serve as a basis for the terms used. Thus, we live in the Information or Digital society, or in the Space, Electronic or even Technetronic Age. The latter characterizations are inspired by the traditional accounts of shifts in technology that we find in expressions such as the Stone and Bronze Ages.
• One of the expressions which has gained currency during the past decades is that of the knowledge society. The term, which was first introduced in the late sixties (Drucker, 1969), has not only become widely spread, it has also been “important for defining research, education and innovation policies” (UNESCO, 2005, p20). In other words, it has been consequential for political decision-making and for steering economic investments in many countries; it has, in the manner we described above by alluding to Foucault, become part of the discourse that produces the objects of which it speaks. Previously, knowledge was a term mainly used for talking about individuals and their skills, but today it is increasingly used in argumentation in a range of settings, irrespective of whether the discussion concerns individual competences and skills or the collective intellectual resources found in organizations, institutions and academic disciplines. When part of metaphorical constructions such as the knowledge society, the knowledge economy or the knowledge industry, the term has very little to do with Plato’s classic definition of knowledge as “justified true beliefs” or Aristotle’s writings on epistêmê and technê. Instead, knowledge has become an ideologically loaded metaphor, rich in suggestive connotations. The notion of knowledge in the expression of knowledge society is more closely connected to economy than to epistemology.
• While the concept of the Bronze Age marks the onset of a period when a civilization started to melt copper and tin and used the resulting alloy to cast bronze artefacts, knowledge was surely a fundamental feature of human existence and organized social life long before anyone thought of a knowledge society. Similarly, international trade and an international, trans-national economy were with us several hundreds of years before recent ideas about globalization. What is often pointed to as new and peculiar to the current situation, however, are the forces of the global economy relying on information technology in an increasingly networked global world. Much of the current European economy is dependent on the possibilities of instant communication with many people and organizations and a market where services and commodities travel over national borders in what is sometimes referred to as a real-time economy. As Hutton and Giddens (2000) point out, it is “the interaction of extraordinary technological innovation combined with world-wide reach driven by global capitalism that gives today’s change its particular complexion” (p. vii).

Some authors have argued that this development makes the world increasingly flat in terms of commerce and competition (Friedman, 2005), whereas others have pointed out that even though globalization has changed the economy in dramatic ways, it has not levelled it (Florida, 2005). Central to this latter argument is that not all people or all societies have access to resources that support innovation and productivity in the manner suggested by the proponents of the blessings of the new technologies; consequently, the world still has its “peaks, hills and valleys” (ibid, p48). And, as this is written in one of the deepest recessions in the world economy during the past hundred years, the metaphor of a valley seems quite rosy. It is obvious that in the discursive constructions surrounding the knowledge economy, knowledge is thought of primarily in instrumental and competitive terms. Using topological metaphors, the access to, and continuous development of, knowledge, accordingly, are seen as ways of reaching and staying at the top of a world primarily engaged in economic competition. As expressed in the World Development Report published by the World Bank, “the balance between knowledge and resources has shifted so far towards the former that knowledge has become perhaps the most important factor determining the standard of living – more than land, than tools, than labor” (1999, p16).

In discussions about the main resources for promoting innovation and increases in productivity, one therefore typically finds references to a well-educated workforce, to the ideas of support for continuous education and re-education of this workforce, and, as an added element of this equation, there are often references to cutting-edge research as the motor behind continuous innovation and product development making adaptation to new circumstances possible. This stress on knowledge as the main resource for economic development and competiveness has been consequential for individuals as well as the educational system. When learning and education are held to be central to all parts of life through life-long and life-wide learning, the previous separation of life into mutually exclusive phases – education, work and retirement – is called into question. As pointed out by Kristensson Uggla (2007), the meaning of the term “life-long learning” has changed during its short existence. Although there still is a tendency to see life-long learning as something that promotes individual growth, the connotations of the concept have changed as the rationales motivating investments in life-long learning nowadays are increasingly couched in economic terms. Life-long learning is no longer primarily seen as a means for promoting social inclusion, personal growth and active citizenship in a democratic society. Rather, it is talked about as a strategy for increasing a person’s chances to compete with others on the labour market in a global economy. The individual nowadays is “doomed to life-long learning” (ibid., p117) – citizens are held responsible for their own learning so as to be prepared whatever transformations the labour market undergoes.

This increasingly market-driven and instrumental view has spread widely and dominates the debates and decision making in the European Union on future policies, where the prime role of schools and universities is to make people “employable”, a terminological innovation which seems to be held in high regard in EU-speak. Limiting the role of education to this concern, its significance in the lives of citizens will be dramatically reduced, as will our discussions about what are the potentials of educative experiences. Through the commodification of skills and knowledge, the role of education will be little more than to supply the labour market in fast capitalist societies with workers, who are “‘eager to stay’ but also ‘willing to leave’” (Gee, Hull and Lankshear, 1996, p19). Along the same lines, it is interesting to see that using these metaphors the debate today often takes a turn where schooling is seen as hampering rather than promoting social and economic development. The OECD (2000), for instance, arguing in these terms questions if educational institutions “can define a new role for schools in building and servicing a knowledge-based society, or will that society marginalize them?” (p11), and further what role schools can legitimately “fulfill in the emerging learning society that would not be better fulfilled by other actors and institutions?” (ibid.). As noted by Robertson “this line of questioning, where the form of schooling is at issue, is a very different order of challenge to the one that drove the restructuring of education during the 1980s and 1990s” (2005, p153). What seems to be at stake here is the assumed ability of current institutions to “accelerate the restructuring sufficiently to produce learners able to contribute directly to accumulation” (loc. cit.).

From a historical point of view, arguments like these appear both paradoxical and fatalistic, if we consider the consequences they imply. It is as if political deliberations and strategies lack the capacity to shape the future and transform social institutions simply because we are living in something referred to as a globalized knowledge society. Of course, employability is vital for the well being of individuals as well as society as a whole, but there are still options when it comes to shaping education and society. The reliance on such a narrow instrumental perspective is not only unwarranted, since we do not know very much about what will make people employable in future, it also distorts the role that education can play in the lives of people living in a dynamic era where knowledge and technology are such important ingredients in our possibilities to exert agency in a democratic society. Instead of being held hostage to such a limiting conception of education and learning, it seems worthwhile to return to a different and more principled understanding of the role schooling in society; ie to begin the discussion from a point of departure that is somewhat less coloured by current hypes on employability and competition, but without denying the implications of the globalization and digital technology for learning and schooling. Thus, if we assume that education has broad functions in democratic societies expanding far beyond what current accountability measures imply, it is interesting to probe into the issue of what the present technological changes may imply for pedagogy and the organization of teaching and learning.

Reconfiguring school practices in conditions of instability: New arenas for learning and new learner identities

In a social situation which is not entirely unlike our own in the sense that it involved a rapid change from one type of society (early industrial) to another one (advanced industrial capitalism), John Dewey (1897) analysed the difficulties of the school system in fully engaging young people in productive forms of learning. He formulated his observations in a number of points, one of which is the following:

I believe that much of present education fails because it neglects this fundamental principle of the school as a form of community life. It conceives the school as a place where certain information is to be given, where certain lessons are to be learned, or where certain habits are to be formed. The value of these is conceived as lying largely in the remote future; the child must do these things for the sake of something else he is to do; they are mere preparation. As a result they do not become a part of the life experience of the child and so are not truly educative. (p78)

• What Dewey addresses here is the conflict between, on the one hand, traditionalist accounts of the role of schooling in reproducing large, and rapidly increasing, bodies of information and knowledge that are taken as given, and, on the other hand, ideals conceiving of education as a space for human development, deliberation and critical reflection with the aim of promoting generative skills and a democratic mindset. The challenge that Dewey formulates is that if our ambition is to make schools contribute to making the young person “an inheritor of the funded capital of civilization” (1897, p1), he or she must be familiar with the manners in which claims to knowledge are produced and substantiated in public discourse as well as in more specialized institutional settings. This implies that we must not make the mistake of assuming that the “statements, the propositions, in which knowledge, the issue of active concern with problems, is deposited, are taken to be themselves knowledge” (1966, p187). If our interest is in knowing as the “active concern with problems”, the current metaphor of knowledge in the expression “knowledge society” gives little guidance when it comes to organizing teaching and learning.
• Most people would agree that the transformations of media culture we currently experience are quite dramatic, and that they have profound effects on our daily lives and on the socialization of new generations. The experiences of what is sometimes referred to as the digital natives or the net generation, who are “fluent in the digital language of computers, video games and the internet” (Prensky, 2005, p8), and for whom technology is “something akin to oxygen: they expect it, it’s what they breathe, and it’s how they live” (Brown, 2002, p70), differ from those of earlier generations. And since learning has to do with adapting to and mastering the discourses and the technologies through which information and knowing are communicated in society, the shifts we experience are significant. The rapid development of technologies further contributes to instability in terms of predicting the exact nature of future life skills, and this implies that pedagogy must be geared towards promoting generative skills in which the competences in literacy, numeracy and interactional skills are high on the agenda. At the same time, and as Dewey noted, neither the traditionalist nor the progressivist agenda seems to have a clear enough interpretation of what this implies. The metaphor of learning underpinning the traditionalist pedagogy is focussed on reproduction and gives the learner too passive a role, while the progressivist approach has been difficult to implement in a coherent and successful manner, an observation which Dewey made almost a hundred years ago. As Østerud (2004) points out, we have to find “a third way”.

It is thus important to consider the affordances offered by the media ecology, and how the habits – in Dewey’s (1963, p35) sense – developed by young people in response to these developments shape and encourage new learning practices and new modes of meaning making. The challenge for schooling today, as in Dewey’s time, is to connect to children’s everyday experiences and introduce new skills and knowledge in such a manner that they are able to bridge what they encounter in school with what they hear and see in other social settings. Schools must be seen as a form of social life in which children and young people engage in activities that they find relevant, meaningful, enabling and that are consequential in terms of learner interests and identities. We have to understand both the affordances of the new media and how they create new arenas and contexts for learning that can be successfully deployed to transform educational practices in directions which fully engage generations that are diverse in their interests and selective in their preferences. To some extent, the digital technologies may serve as an element in such ambitions. Again, however, there are risks of adopting too narrow an approach to education based on these accounts. In relation to Prensky’s discussion about digital natives, for instance, both his claims that there are new preferences specific for a young generation and his suggestions for how to reform educational practices can be seen as overly reductionist (cf. Bennett, Maton and Kervin, 2008, p780). The idea of a new generation presupposes that the learning preferences are homogeneous and static; something students ‘have’. A more reasonable point of departure is that the current media ecology contributes to an increasing diversity between people in terms of their experiences, interests, habits and skills. On similar grounds one could also question Prensky’s (2001) conclusion that “one of the few structures capable of meeting the digital natives’ changing learning needs and requirements is the very video and computer games they so enjoy” (p5), a point of view also insisted on by Gee (2003, 2005) in many of his writings. Educational reform and classroom organization are highly complex and there are, as we have pointed to, many goals to accomplish. It is highly unlikely that we can reduce these issues to problems of software development and content packaging. For instance, large proportions of students would find extensive game-playing extremely boring (cf, Arnseth, 2008).

The examples at the beginning of this chapter illustrate some features of what this new configuration of learning practices imply. One example is that students can work and experiment in virtual realities with hands-on explorations of complex phenomena that they do not understand. The mediated and interactive environment provides a way into this world that would hardly be accessible through other channels. And from this platform students can make experiences in a micro-world of molecules and consider the wider social and even political implications of the technologies they are beginning to familiarize themselves with. Learning can expand both downwards into the details of molecules and genetics, but also upwards into the consequences of these technologies for the future of society. In this sense, such experiences provide short-cuts into higly specialized forms of knowing at the same time as they connect to issues about values and citizenship by showing the dilemmas which emerge with powerful technologies and that we will have to respond to as citizens in a democratic society.

One of the most important consequences of media development in relation to issues of teaching and learning is that children and young people no longer are just consumers of media: they are increasingly producers of mediated communication in a range of activities such as online social communities, blogs, wikis and personal broadcastings. In Gaston’s terms this implies that “the consumer of information is in charge – not the producer” (2006, p12), but the shift has many layers. An illustration of such recent developments is the emergence of Web 2.0 – a term which highlights the increased focus on media production, information sharing and collaboration among users. Even though Web 2.0 has been made possible by recent software developments, the term does not point to any specific technological developments. Instead, it refers to a change in how the web is used, particularly how content is produced and distributed. Although the statistics on how children and young people use the internet tend to be outdated rather quickly, it is obvious that user-driven media production is a phenomenon with a very substantial impact. According to one survey made in 2006, over 90% of American teens between 12 and 17 used the internet, and about 60% used it daily (Lenhart et al, 2007). Two thirds of the total number of users reported having engaged in some kind of content creating activity. Half of them reported uploading photos, just as many had created a profile on a social networking site and almost a third reported that they had been creating their own online journal or blog. Thus, the issue is not only about control of information, but also, and more importantly, a change in positions and identities when engaging in media practices.

The networked technologies create new platforms for learning with new kinds of involvements. These developments are visible even in rather traditional areas of teaching and learning. Recent research in the areas of second language learning, for instance, shows how such activities may be reconfigured and result in new types of learner inolvement when networked technologies are used. In regular classroom conditions language learning – one of the core activities of schooling – is approached in terms of exercises, and there is an absence of tangible social consequences of uses of language. The communication is generally asymmetric and often rather artificial. In computer mediated activities and what is referred to as telecollaboration, the language to be appropriated may be used for purposeful, communicative purposes that imply exchanges with other learners or native speakers of the language in question (for overviews, see Blake, 2007; O’Dowd and Ritter, 2006). Telecollaboration between students may take place across linguistic and cultural boundaries, and when communicating students will act “as agents who coconstruct not only shared meanings, but also their own roles within a bilingual chat community” (Blake, 2007, p78). This implies that the communication engaged in goes in different directions and serves different purposes besides learning language in a narrow sense. In such activities, the language registers used and the participatory roles of students will be varied and this will have implications for what is learned. They may build up lasting social relationships, explore various features of their daily lives and engage in a range of activities where not only language skills but also the pragmatic competence in the target language will be improved. Such “immersive environments” in which language use has more authentic qualities and is consequential will have implications for intercultural learning in a broad sense. Also in the case of gaming, there are opportunities for language learning in the sense that they serve as environments in which people use language in contexts of “carrying out tasks and social actions, which concomitantly embeds vocabulary and grammatical constructions in rich associative contexts” (Thorne and Black, 2007, p147).

The world of online communities offers a range of new contexts for learning literacy and language skills in ecologically challenging contexts. One such illustration is the so-called fan-fiction communities in which fans of “various media such as books, movies, television, comics, and video games borrow elements of these popular cultural texts, such as characters, settings, and plotlines” to “construct their own narrative fictions” (Thorne and Black, 2007, p144). These narratives circulate between participants who create complex stories through joint authorship over extended periods of time. Online communities in fascinating manners blur the distinction between learning and exploration of issues of concern to young people. Another such example is communities where young people can discuss issues that relate to their own life and their own identity when living in a predominantly non-Muslim environment. Larsson (in press) studies how young Muslims raise questions to Muftis on internet sites, such as IslamOnline.net and Islamweb.net, about whether it is permissible for Muslims to read Harry Potter and what are the arguments for and against doing this given that the Koran is negative to magic.

What these examples about learning and communicating in online communities and similar settings illustrate is the signficance of issues of participation and identity formation for learning (Lave and Wenger, 1991; cf. Wenger, 1998). People develop skills and insights not just by studying in solitude, but also by participating in communities. In online communities and such contexts children have possibilities to engage in networking in which their concerns expand beyond what would be relevant in their roles as students in regular schooling. Such experiences will be conducive to promoting the kinds of meta-skills and awareness of the perspectives of other people that are necessary parts of knowing in a complex society and that can be argued to be a vital element in a democratic conception of knowledge and argumentation.

Conclusion: Knowing with technologies

• Digital technology offers an almost perfect solution to the problem of storing information. It provides the resources for building up a collective memory of an incredible magnitude. Through the internet and portable technology, the access to information, irrespective of where in the world we are, has increased dramatically over the past decade. We reach databases, libraries and most information sources from our homes. In these circumstances, our knowing to a considerable extent reflects our abilities to make productive use of such resources in accountable and creative manners for specific purposes. And it is precisely for skills of this kind that we are now held accountable: it is not for our memorizing capacities or abilities to respond to questions where the answers are already known.
• But the development is not just about storage capacity and access to information, as we have pointed out. It is also about other significant changes, for instance, in the uses of images, animations and other modes of representing the world and even manipulating it as we illustrated in our first example from classroom activities. Multimodality offers new modes of expressing oneself and new modes of articulating knowing and insight. What we also experience is how tools come to inhabit traces of human reasoning and serve as powerful extensions of the human mind. Search engines, calculators, navigators, word-processors with features such as spell- and grammar-checks, book-keeping programs and a range of similar tools and software become increasingly sophisticated and powerful as cognitive amplifiers (Nickerson, 2005). A modern book-keeping program allows the user to make complex calculations and estimations within seconds, and the mechanics of the analyses and reanalyses can be produced almost without any intellectual costs to the skilled user. The efforts can be spent on the conceptual and analytical aspects of the activity (Cole and Derry, 2005; Säljö et al, 2006). And as yet another element following the expansion of the role of networked technologies in our lives, we encounter new contexts of learning about the world and other people. In these settings the traditional identity of being a student is challenged.

Put differently, and with a view to history, we inhabit a world that can be described as a Socratic nightmare. In Phaedrus, Plato (370 BC) lets Socrates articulate his aversion to letters and texts. Using such resources as external aides-mémoire “will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves”. Failing to memorize the classic stories will dramatically reduce the intellectual capacities of the young and eventually cause their brains to shrink. Users of such artificial resources, Socrates argues, “will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality”. Present-day users of computers, search engines, electronic calculators, navigators, word-processors and a range of similar tools exert their intellectual and creative powers in collaboration with an increasing number of cognitive amplifiers; they are knowledgeable and can handle information precisely because they can interact with such externalizations of human intelligence and powers of reasoning.

• A consequence of the pressure exercised on education through the new habits that digital media encourage is that new metaphors of learning are emerging. Knowing is no longer perceived as the ability to reproduce what is already known or mastered. Learning is increasingly conceived as the ability to transform information to knowing in manners that are relevant for particular purposes and specific situations. This is an essential feature of media literacy: learning is in the performative and in the ability to convert information to something that is accountable and knowing. Information is general and can be stored and searched through technological resources, but knowing is local and in response to an issue or a problem (Liedman, 2001). Learning is about analysing and synthesizing and coming up with answers that are consequential since they are embedded in an issue or a project that matters. Learning will be increasingly modelled on the activity that we know as research; it is, in Dewey’s words, an active concern with problems and their solutions.

Instruction does not become interesting or better just because there are computers and digital technology in the classrooms. Anyone who has spent time in a school quickly realizes this, and the list of failed attempts to introduce information technology in schools is long. The novelty of even the most dramatic innovation soon wears off. The first attempts to make use of computer technology for educational purposes were launched fifty years ago, but the learning machine that many predicted would close the classrooms and make teachers out of jobs has not appeared. Nor will it, in our opinion. What we are witnessing is a more profound change in which our world and our daily practices are transformed through the consequences of digital technologies. Pedagogy, the purposeful organization of educative experiences, must respond to these changes but schools and educationists must interpret what they imply for their own practices. There is no given yardstick which can simply be imported from other activity systems; what the current changes imply for learning and schooling must be interpreted within the educational system. But the general direction in which pedagogy must be transformed seems clear: learning is moving from reproducing what is given to the ability to convert information to accountable knowing and to engage in activities that are based on what Dewey refers to as an active concern with problems with educative potentials; and a successful learner is one who develops the identity of finding joy in doing this.

References

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The research reported here been funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation and the Swedish Research Council. The work was carried out within the Linnaeus Centre for Research on Learning, Interaction and Mediated Communication in Contemporary Society (LinCS) funded by the Swedish Research Council. The text was written while the third author was a Finland Distinguished Professor at the Centre for Learning Research, University of Turku.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

Rosanvallon (2008), a historian and political philosopher, talks about the need to reinvent democracy: elections are not enough to ensure the system’s legitimacy and it is urgent to develop a democracy of “interaction”. His position, close to a form of deliberative democracy, also implies the reform of the current functioning of the representative system. This theoretical framework is different from one that opposes a liberal and individualist conception of citizenship to a communitarian conception. Nevertheless, it can be associated with Haste’s argument (2004) that one becomes a citizen through praxis. Haste and Hogan (2006) linked the moral to the political dimension, in relation to young people and citizenship. They argue that the distinction of private and public spheres in Western thought is not useful for addressing the motivational dimensions of political behaviour.

For the purpose of this paper the author adopts the normative and Western view that democracy, as a way to become autonomous, can only exist through constant re-invention, and a citizen can only “be” when she is empowered to participate in the creation of common rules. This is a way to say that meaning and central symbolic meanings are constructed, and only when we accept our responsibility as meaning-makers, can we exist as persons and not subjects. In this way, a human being is seen as a social animal, as communitarian arguments would suggest, but not every community or participation meets the criterion of autonomy that in Castoriadis’s thought has a Marxist and psychoanalytic dimension and is not linked to liberal perspectives as Taylor (1991) implies.

The concept of the “self” is used as dialogical, as a product and producer of a changing social and cultural context, for the purpose of this paper. This position derives from the socio-psychological tradition of social representations (Moscovici, 1984), but also from recent developments in the perspective of the dialogical self. The other is thus conceptualized as a constitutive part of the self in terms of a multiplicity of voices emerging from global-local dialectics. Hermans and Dimaggio (2007) alternate the concept of “self” with that of “identity” as in the title of their article “Self, Identity, and Globalization in Times of Uncertainty: A Dialogical Analysis”. In this review paper this author also alternates the term “self-efficacy and citizenship” as a dimension of a social identity. In an era of increased globalisation, the number and nature of voices of the self have expanded and increasingly involve mediated forms of dialogue. From the perspective of critical psychology, Papadopoulos (2008) provides a non-essentialist definition, of “identity”, inspired from the work of Vygotsky (1934). The main idea is that “identity” is never “identical” to what it used to be. The sense of self is on the move in a way, more than something stable.

Although self or identity as concepts can be highly ambiguous and imply tensions and contradictions, at the level of lay thinking, the self needs to be represented as a narrative with a certain continuity, in order to have a sense of well being, at least in western cultures (Hermans and Dimaggio, 2007). What is more, the possibility of projecting oneself to the future is essential not only for an individual sense of well-being, but is also an important dimension for a society or community (Mead, 1934; Butterworth, 1992).

Other conceptualizations of self that can be useful are those of Lahlou and Slevin. Lahlou (2008) proposes a conception of the representation of the self for lay thinking that enables us to make a link with technology and citizenship. He claims that the issue of identity is complex because it refers both to how we define ourselves from a subjective point of view and how we define ourselves to others. He distinguishes three dimensions: a physical (subject as body), a social (subject as a social position), and a biographical (subject as the product of past experiences and desires). Slevin (2000) draws from Giddens (1991) and views self as a symbolic project in late modernity. He refers to the distinctive tensions and difficulties which people have to resolve in order to preserve a coherent narrative of self-identity, what Giddens calls “dilemmas of the self” that can also be related to the “dialogical self” perspective.

This review paper is particularly interested in citizenship as the social dimension of the self and the way a sense of self-inefficacy, or a lack of recognition as an actor, can be constructive or destructive in re-establishing a sense of power for young people. This feeling has to do, on the one hand, with the dissolution of traditional ways to structure symbolic meanings after the end of the Cold War such as the left-right spectrum in Western society (Haste, 2004). On the other hand, it is linked to the intensification of globalization with the feeling of uncertainty that it brings (Hermans and Dimaggio, 2007). The understanding of what is positive or constructive is related to everything that enhances life and diversity that allows a construction of the “self” which is both a creation and creator of society. This derives from the political philosophy of Castoriadis, who links the notion of individual and collective autonomy and liberation, to democracy (1987).

The notion of citizenship cannot be limited to the nation-state. Citizenship implies a community, a group where someone can be a member, a citizen, but this paper focuses more on the socio-psychological dimension of the concept, especially since globalization and technology allow different representations of the communities we create and belong to. Local, national, global, but also virtual and imaginary communities can be taken into consideration.

Where things stand: Do young adults have a feeling of inefficacy in the public sphere?

If autonomy is a normative objective, this review starts from the premise that the feeling of inefficacy at the public sphere (Bandura, 1997) alienates youth from more conventional forms of participation in the representative democratic system. In that way, the social dimension of the self, “citizenship”, becomes problematic. The feeling of inefficacy is based in a number of “realities” that young people face in different European countries:

1. The formal education system is still inspired by a mentality of authority and hierarchy that is not accepted not only by the more disadvantaged youth but also from those who are materially and culturally more fortunate (at least in Greece) (Fragoudaki; Dragonas, 1997). Although it provides knowledge about the functioning of the political system through a range of different classes, it does not empower young people (Condor and Gibson, 2007). Since citizenship is conceptualized as dialogical (Hermans and Dimaggio, 2007) and action oriented (Haste, 2004), it is through the possibility of changing their everyday realities that young people could be empowered and this could lead to their being recognized by significant others as existing, acting citizens.

This dimension is not always present for a number of reasons. Resistance to authority as it was conceived in the past and materialized by institutions is one of the characteristics of younger generations according to authors such as Sanford (2007). The use of computers among high school students, according to Wighting (2006), contributes to the development of a sense of community that can be linked to academic success. However it does not change the structure of an education system that could be defined as “monological” in the sense that accurate information and knowledge is “top down”. On the other hand, education can lead young adults to higher and more sophisticated expectations of the political system than older generations (Bennett, 2008).

2. The material condition of young people and the less young that is characterized by mobility, the sense of the ephemeral and insecurity.

Youth as a social construction

Youth, as a sociological category, seems to extend at least to 30 year-olds, according to the way researchers in the social sciences set up their categories in Europe. Although there are researches that still refer to 12 to 21 year-olds as the young people (Haste and Hogan, 2006), there are many others in different European countries that define young adults as the 18 to 30 year olds: for example, the research report of Laaksonen (2000) on young people in Finland, Sweden and Germany refers to young people as “18-29 years-old”. In other cases, there is reference to the “generation of 20-40 years-old”, as Generation X (Sanford, 2007).

Concerning questions of life style, the 20-40 years-old could have a lot in common: this has to do with their precarious life-style that is extended more and more not only in Europe (ie Laaksonen, 2000), but also in the United States (Heiman, 2001). A stable relationship, job and independence from parents that used to be the criteria for entering the world of adults, seem to be postponed indefinitely, since youth is not only a biological but also a cultural value and social construction (Galland, 1993; Cicchelli, 2001). In that way, an ageing European population extends youth further and further, so there is no clear limit since certain “youth” lifestyles are adopted by older populations. Jobs are less and less stable, in different levels of the social hierarchy, as is income.

Changing jobs is also related to mobility, within the same country or abroad, or between different professions. Sanford’s report (2007) concerning the USA concludes that mobility is only going to increase with higher levels of education. The decline of fixed benefit pensions and increasing globalisation imply that social capital definitions that rely on more stable residency patterns put them at variance with individual realities and engines of economic growth. Even for more fortunate, well paid young adults, there is an alienating effect of the question “which is the community I belong to?” and a work affiliation that alternates with unemployment is not enough to offer an alternative to the weakening of more “traditional” social identities, national or local. Relationships can be less stable due to this fact. For the more disadvantaged, this feeling of the ephemeral, and the inability to project oneself to the future, gives a feeling of marginalization. Why vote for tax laws if one doesn’t pay taxes? Bennett (2008) and Heiman (2001) imply that this position could be a sign of sophistication.

Class differences exist, of course, and so does gender, but the author’s hypothesis is that there is no category excluded from this trend or from the feeling that they don’t matter. Apart from income, other characteristics differentiate the social dimension of the young generation’s representation of the self: there are many differences related to their culture, gender, religion, and their interaction, to give a few examples. Minorities, for example, or young Muslims could face different challenges from the majority of young people. Hopkins and Hopkins (2006), mention the lack of studies on how minorities conceptualize stigmatized identities, for example, British Muslims’ conceptualization of “Islamophobia”. This tension is related not only to the traditional public space of the nation-state but also to the local and to the global or cosmopolitan space.

3. A sense of inefficacy and “empowerment” through violent communities, or a subversive way to practice democratic values.

Could the “Local” dimension be the solution to autonomy and empowerment? Sauvadet (2006), in a series of interviews and participant observation with “dangerous” youth (that for him extends at least to the age of 35) of the French banlieus, the suburbs, insists on the link between the material conditions that lead to a lack of a space of their own and to them being on the streets, the prolonged periods of unemployment and especially the fact that they cannot become materially independent from their parents, for which they are criticized. But most problematically they lack the facility to project themselves into the future (Wakslak et al, 2008). The community they belong to, their “gang”, could represent a community where they matter, but in a destructive way since they are stigmatized by the larger society.

This sociological research is relevant to social psychological findings (eg. Klandermans, 1997; Stümer and Simon, 2004) that individuals for whom group identity is more relevant are more likely to participate in collective action than individuals for whom group identity is less relevant. However, there are different types of “collective action”. Van Zomeren, Spears and Leach (2008) who study two psychological mechanisms of collective action, differentiate two ways to deal with collective disadvantage: one, problem-focused coping and two, emotion-focused coping that seems relevant for the angry youth of the “banlieus”. Studies on the affective component of relative deprivation show that it is linked to collective action (Smith and Ortiz, 2002). What is more, the power of collective identification to mobilize people for collective action has been proved to derive partly from processes of identity affirmation (Simon, Trötschel, Dähne, 2008). So, the young disadvantaged and migrant youth who organize either in drug dealing enterprises, or in violence, practice collective action and certain values of a democratic community.

A study that involved participant observation with a crack gang, done in Chicago by Venkatesh (2000), a social anthropologist, comes to similar conclusions concerning the life of the community: the gang was one of approximately 100 branches or franchises, of an organisation. The college educated leader of the franchise reported to a central leadership that was called the board of directors. Three officers reported directly to the franchise leader. Beneath them were 20 foot soldiers, dreaming of becoming officers, and 200 members who paid dues to the gang for protection, or for the chance to become a foot soldier. Although certain aspects of this organisation are similar to that of a business, the way the leader took care of his people and their families is similar to that of a community where each member counts: the gang invested in “community events” which would include paying for a dead member’s funeral and giving a stipend of up to three year’s wages to the victim’s family: “Their families are our families, we been knowing these folks our whole lives, so we grieve when they grieve”.

In that sense communities can be of utmost importance, and “helping with the community” a sign of civic involvement, but the type of community could also differentiate the outcome. The particular character of a community could have different effects on their members and enhance (or not) democratic values and autonomy. The way in which the local community relates to the national or global level could also be an important variable of the configuration.

4. At the level of the nation-state, disaffection from conventional political parties whose role is traditionally to be a channel of participation and legitimate expression of contest in the public sphere, means disaffection from traditional forms of contest. It seems that dissatisfied youth do not use them to mediate their anger. The public sphere becomes the “macrocosm” where they are not important (Magioglou, 2008). Feelings of belonging to a national community such as the British, the Greeks, the Japanese, do not always signify confidence in the state and the importance of participating in elections that do not change their everyday life. Single issue politics are the result; (for example French youth demonstrating against a law of the Right Wing government in 2006 that proposed a special “youth” job contract of limited duration, or Greek youth demonstrating against changes to the education system, or the anti-war movement).

Several studies in the last ten years have demonstrated political apathy, cynicism and the lack of political participation by young people in the political system. Their results refer to “conventional” forms of political participation that include voting and party affiliation. The MORI Omnibus survey in 1996, for example, demonstrates that age is a key determinant of involvement in formal politics. 40% of 18-25 year-olds did not vote in the 1997 election in Britain; until 1997 the average age of party members was 48 for the Labour Party and 62 for the Conservative (Fahmy, 1999). This research has drawn attention to the consequences of growing economic marginalization of youth in terms of their access to social rights of citizenship (Haste, 2004).

Political apathy is related to the impact of economic and social hardship, according to Pacheco and Plutzer (2008), using data from the National Education Longitudinal Survey, 1988-2000 for the United States. A random set of 80% of respondents was selected for follow-up interviews and 50% of those students completed the entire panel. Their results show that disadvantage in the family of origin is correlated with later markers of disadvantage and all have negative impact on turnout for voting. Bontempi and Pocaterra (2007) found that youth voter turnout in most European countries has declined significantly, despite rises in education and income, particularly in long-established democracies like the United Kingdom.

In a more recent study concerning the forms of political participation in England, such as the MORI polls for the Nestlé Family Monitor (2003), the figures for expected “conventional” political activity were similar to the international average but for “unconventional” activity including legal and illegal protest they were well below (28% for England, compared to 44%, the international average to participation in non violent protest). Haste (2004) argues that this data prove the change of the notion of citizenship and democracy for young people, together with the way they co-construct narratives that make sense of experience. This interpretation can be applied to the way other European young adults, such as the young Greeks, represent democracy (Magioglou, 2008).

However, if the notion of “political” is extended in order to include a “moral” dimension, there are results that claim that the young people are politically active. Haste and Hogan (2006) have argued that alienation, or a feeling of inefficacy, could be associated for the case of the British youth with the “conventional” forms of political participation, such as voting. On the contrary, there are other forms of civic engagement, such as helping with the community and making one’s voice heard, in which the British youth engage. The findings are based on research carried out in 2005 using on-line questionnaires and interviews in schools. Participants were from 11 to 21 year’s old. Only a quarter of the population was inactive in the civic domain as defined by the study. Although these findings are very optimistic, certain items were linked to a normative action and the attributes of the “good citizen” questionable: for example, a vast majority of the participants thinks that obeying the law is very important (90%) but only 48% would protest against a law they believe unjust. Obeying the law could be a way to respect common rules, or a way to respect a reified “power” one has nothing to do with. More qualitative analysis could illustrate the meanings related to that. At the same time, helping the community could be extremely important unless the young person is taking up predetermined, “monological” roles. In this case it is far from being an act of citizenship the way it is usually understood.

A study that focuses on the representation of political participation with a qualitative approach is that of Condor and Gibson (2007). After a conversation analysis on interviews with young white adults from 18 to 24 years old, and following Billig’s perspective on ideological dilemmas, (Billig, 1988), Condor and Gibson argue that everyday understanding of political participation showed dilemmatic tensions. These tensions were situated between values of active citizenship, on the one hand, and norms of liberal individualism on the other. More specifically, Marquand (1991) argues that the British liberal individualist ethos is associated with a “passive” model of citizenship: one in which the public sphere is understood to be populated by autonomous individuals who, far from having a duty to participate in public affairs, are accorded rights to protect them from interference by the community. Concerning political efficacy, the respondents expressed the view that their vote would not make any difference or it made no difference which party was in power. Although they justified political disengagement as usual or appropriate for people of their age or stage of life, these same individuals also tended to orient to a normative assumption that political engagement was a marker of maturity and civic responsibility. In conclusion, the authors questioned whether everyday understandings of responsible citizenship entail injunctions to political action.

These findings are similar to results on the meaning of democracy for young adults in Greece (Magioglou, 2008). Part of the participants, a group that was defined as using a “consensual” way of thinking, saw themselves as citizens “to be”. They considered that for now, they would apply democratic values in their “microcosmos”, waiting to be fully integrated socially, to be effective in the public sphere. They had a strong feeling of political inefficacy, but that didn’t matter for the time being because they belonged to a group with justified optimistic aspirations of upper social mobility. Either their family was well off, or they were in a sector with job opportunities, and they focused on becoming more independent financially and socially from their family. This group was considered to be in a state of a “waiting room”, postponing their life as citizens. However, for the bigger part of the sample, this situation was associated with anger and feelings of alienation.

Trends: the role of new technologies and self efficacy construction

The public appeal of films of popular culture such as ‘The Matrix’, is an example of the link between a feeling of inefficacy and the fears of the digitalised world to come. Philosophers such as Zizek (2004) have analysed its importance using a Lacanian method of reading the reaction of the public: the role of ‘The Matrix’ is seen as the reduction of the subject to a total passivity, of its use as an instrument. Is liberation possible? Can the digitalized world, on the contrary, provide the means to a form of liberation from the state of subjection and inefficacy, and contribute to the creation of autonomous citizens? It is interesting that the scenario of the film is so close to a case of paranoia reported in 1919 by the psychoanalyst Victor Tausk: a group of schizophrenics believed that their problems were caused by an “influencing machine” operated by alien forces. The patients saw the machine as feeding on the emotions and “souls” of human beings unconscious of their true state. Indeed for these patients, knowing about the machine that is “seeing” the real, could be fatal because … it revealed the givens of everyday reality to be fabrications. Sanal (2008), who mentions this case, concludes that to this day, the use of machine metaphors marks persistent fears of invasion, possession and authoritarian control.

Lahlou (2008), a social psychologist, considers that there is a process of digitalization in society where three levels, the physical, the mental and the institutional guide subjects into their activity track. The physical level refers to material reality and artifacts, it provides affordances (Gibson, 1982). Representations and practices provide possible interpretations of the situation and enable subjects to elaborate and plan behaviours. At a social level, institutions set the rules to be applied to maintain order and foster cooperation and communities of interest. He points that ten years ago Google did not exist and that now, children’s sociability is made up of SMS, blogs, chats and instant messaging. Although these systems are designed tec-down, teenage sociability is one of the outcomes of these techniques. At the cognitive level, Alexandrov’s findings (2008), based on experiments conducted on animals in neuroscience, concern learning processes. They show that by training our children with digital-learning techniques, using them on an everyday basis, we are modifying at the neural level, the very way we perceive the world. The brain for him is a system in which every new learning is built on existing structures and modifies the previous organization. Therefore, previously formed behaviour is modified by forming a new behaviour. Even “classic” objects take on a new meaning in this new context of practice.

Lahlou (2008) adds the notion of “face” and “persona” as dimensions of a person’s notion of “identity” in the digital world. If a person’s physical “identity”, the body, is of limited value in the digital world, according to Lahlou, the social, psychological and subjective dimensions become the useful cues for transactions and interactions in the digital world. “Face” is more than the mere presentation of self as considered in Western psychology, following Goffman (1963). He includes in this notion the Eastern Asian sense of moral integrity, intention, position, propriety and outward behaviour.

The notion of “Persona” has also been used in the ICT literature, especially for interaction in media spaces. It is either considered as a partial individual construct, a sub-self or alias, created as an agent or proxy by the subject, or as a passive identity created by gathering activity traces of a subject (Clarke, 1994). The “Second Life” game is a virtual space where Personas are used. However, it is considered that in both cases of “face” and of “Persona”, there is an active role of the person who is creating and using them in the digital world, giving a sense of power and efficacy. Negative experiences are also possible (Helsper, 2008), but that does not limit the possibilities for a new sense of efficacy.

Possible directions with the help of digital media towards a feeling of efficacy and empowerment in new “spaces”

Magioglou’s data in Greece (2005; 2008) show that the reaction of young adults to the sense of inefficacy is taking two directions that could be expressed in a constructive or destructive way:

a) the exercise of democracy in the private sphere of the “microcosm” which means one’s physical self, the family, circle of friends, communities one belongs to (face to face or virtual, connecting through the internet). The microcosm can become extended through the possibilities technology can offer in the digital world, and the “personal becomes political” as Giddens has argued. In this way, the delimitation of what counts as moral and political change, together with the meaning of the political itself (Haste and Hogan, 2006).

b) Refusal of the actual national or international political system and adoption of a mystical, spiritual and virtual conception of democracy, associated to the meaning of life, to love and beauty. Violence is not excluded as a means to an end, but no participants could find an alternative that was worth or plausible to fight for.

In both cases, Maglioglou considers that technology is used either as a means to escape from the feeling of inefficacy, even in destructive ways, or as a means to create new realities, and it is closer to the notion of citizenship as a form of autonomy. An example is the participation in alternative groups and communities that organise altermondialist manifestations.

The sense of inefficacy and the physical dimension of the self

Contrary to Lahlou (2008) who underplays the role of the physical dimension of the self in the digitalized world, several studies show its importance. The body, as part of the self and a means of interaction with otherness, could be a dimension where one could feel important, using different ways to dress and express oneself (Riley, 2008); having eating disorders, using drugs or stabbing, having sex. There is a sense of immediacy and a sense of control that is a possible way out of the feeling of inefficacy. The facility of younger generations with new technologies offers another option where one could “matter” by creating or participating in already existing communities, based on new forms of subjectivity. The case of the “pro-ana” (pro-anorexia) websites is a combination of both dimensions for a creative, but destructive form of “citizenship” and empowerment that combines one’s physical and virtual reality. Giles (2006) describes how people who share experiences of eating disorders create a cyberspace community where they can meet virtually in a positive and supportive environment. The community creates specific rules of inclusion-exclusion and the result is, as the author says, a “rich tapestry of identity work”. Different subgroups are created and the boundaries between them are contested. This example is a way of creating a community where one “matters” but in a very self- and group-destructive way. Hermans and Dimaggio (2007) mention a big increase in cases such as eating disorders, which are associated with identity problems.

In the case of disadvantaged young people, there may be a lack of access to technology (Bennett, 2007) because of the absence of material (computers, space to work on the computer); and the family TV is not very accessible since they share it. Violence could take more or less digitalized forms. In the case of violent youth (stabbing for adolescents, drug users) there is a possibility of feeling that one “matters’ and a sense of negative efficacy through the destructive use of one’s or other people’s bodies. Terrorist groups networking through the internet could be a digitalized way to express anger and construct a positive self identity, by relinquishing one’s autonomy.

In contrast are the examples of globalized altermondialist social movements which organize through the internet and bring together many people from different geographical areas which share cultural, ideological and political characteristics. They show how virtual communities are also real and participate in the public sphere, proposing a point of view in a constructive way. The work of Della Porta (Della Porta et al, 2006) on “globalization from below”, shows in a series of studies how altermondialist demonstrations were organized in Italy against the G8 in Genoa and the ESF in Florence, protesting against a certain form of globalization. The demonstrations expressed a strong demand for political participation that political parties no longer seemed able to respond to. Protest developed outside the parties and presented strong criticism of representative democracy. Although exhibiting a slow start, some concerns start to be debated by left wing parties.

What is the percentage of young adults in this movement? Taking into consideration the importance of communication through the internet, and the facility of younger populations with it, we assume that they form an important part of it. At the end of the book the authors affirm that citizens’ trust and interest in conventional forms of democratic participation seem to be reduced and that “the new cycle of protest is witness to a growing demand for politics, albeit of a new, unexpected type, in particular from the new generations”. Held’s notion of cosmopolitan democracy could be close to this kind of civic engagement at the global level (Held, 2008).

New forms of efficacy in a new kind of public space: digital mobs and dialogic publicness

Self efficacy could be strengthened through the use of control and the expression of one’s opinion that the internet allows. However, if the formation of a digital public opinion becomes the “Panopticon” of Bentham, this could be another negative way to practice self-efficacy. Dennis (2008) mentions the case of the “dog-shit girl”, name given to a girl by South Korean bloggers who refused to clean her dog’s shit on the subway,. A passenger took a picture of the girl and posted it on a popular Korean website. Soon after, people started searching for her identity until they found her, in order to “punish” her for her behaviour. Within days, her pictures and parodies where everywhere, and were soon transferred to Western sites. The girl in question had to quit university because of the humiliation and even contemplated suicide. Dennis, using also other examples, raises the question: are we facing the constitution of “digital mobs” with a mass psychology, which find new techniques to exercise their power? This kind of “public opinion” amplified through the use of new technologies such as mobile phones with digital cameras and the internet could have destructive or constructive aspects, depending on the way they are used. The result also depends on whether the social dimension of the selves, this tec-citizenship, does or does not involve a notion of responsibility (Haste, 2004).

In a more positive framework, Slevin (2000) speaks of the dialogical mediated publicness, the possibility to create “dialogical spaces” through the internet, which was not the case with the television and the radio. Sanford (2007) found through written surveys and oral interviews with young people in Austin, from 2000 to 2003, that the respondents thought quite deeply about public life and civic involvement when given the opportunity. Her research objective was to test Putnam’s assumption regarding the typical characterizations of Generation X actors (which includes for her 20 to 40 year-olds). She claims that the respondents are actively involved in a new form of civic life. In the contemporary economy, increased mobility is a fact of life. Increasing educational levels have long been associated with higher levels of social involvement but also with higher levels of mobility. A “just in time” social capital activities will become the norm.

However, the population she refers to, and the categories of “tech elites”, “cyber-democrats”, “wireheads” and “trailing Xers”, is composed of young people who belong to social and cultural elite. They lead technology companies, work in the intersection of politics and technology, are cubicle dwelling functionaries or students. Instead of privileging the vote, they place greater value on the work ethic and on being politically informed and active. They reject formality and structure in favour of greater responsiveness. They see technology as a powerful tool and they are creators rather than joiners. They place personal choice over transcendent obligation and they embrace a more personal sort of reciprocity where one asks for help to animate a personal cycle rather than do something nice and animate an abstract social cycle. They look for low social barriers of entry and exit and they enjoy creative work, easily blurring the lines between work time, social time, personal time and community time. The author has an “individualistic” conception of this generation that is quite different to the young public who participated in the humiliation of the “dog-shit girl”.

Conclusion and future prospects

The question that should be raised is in what ways education could empower young people so that they become “autonomous” citizens, confident that they matter, and creators of meanings and narratives instead of meaning-consumers and subjects. The question is also how the feeling of inefficacy could be overcome in a way that respects “democratic values” and doesn’t result in the physical or symbolic destruction of self and others in order to feel empowered. The more mobility becomes the norm and youth becomes extended as an in-between unstable category, the more education could become dialogical and reach young and less young populations on the move.

The young people who watched ‘Matrix‘, and adhered to the conception of a reality of alienation and relinquishment of one’s autonomy by a digitalized world, those who were seen in the US as “slackers” (Heiman, 2001), were, with the dot.com generation, or the “digital natives” those who also massively voted for Barak Obama. In ‘Matrix‘, resistance starts from an awakening from the false consciousness to a “new” reality, that has a common point with the old one, it is exclusive and it is the “truth”, a way to see things that extinguish ambiguity. However, uncertainty seems to increase as people become more mobile and communities can both threaten and sustain autonomy. A youth gang of drug dealers can be an example: young people learn their respect for a sense of hierarchy, courage, solidarity, even a notion of business and deliberation. The community enhances their self-esteem and also makes them feel empowered, that they matter. Fundamentalist communities could also function as a haven where certain values of participation can be learned and practiced. The pro-ana virtual communities are another example of a creative form of identity construction that combines a physical with a symbolic dimension. In the past, fascist and Nazi regimes took pains to integrate the youth into some forms of organisation and participation was often obligatory.

However, there is a problem with this kind of communities. They do not work towards a form of autonomy or some kind of “liberation” both of the self and of the group or society one belongs to. That is why it is alarming that the category “obey the law” is deemed important for a good citizen for 90% of the British youth. If the law is something that is imposed from outside, a kind of reified power, this is the way a subject of an authoritarian rule would also answer.

The results of the USA elections in November 2008, show a different direction and could be considered a “surprise”, or what Haste (2008) has characterized as a “knight’s move”, with the proof of massive mobilisation of the younger generations for Barak Obama. The internet seems to have played an important role for this mobilisation. Is this a proof of the “return” of the American youth to the traditional ways of political participation? Is it something exceptional or will it create a phenomenon that will also influence young people in other parts of the world? It is already significant that young people outside of the US have manifested their support, so it could be an event that will change the way younger generations have related to politics in the last two decades.

Bennett (2008) finishes his chapter on changing citizenship in the digital age with a question: “are politicians, parents, educators, policymakers, and curriculum developers willing to allow young citizens to more fully explore, experience, and expand democracy, or will they continue to force them to just read all about it?” The question for this review is: are we supposing that we have a perfect political system and our only preoccupation as societies is how to replicate it and indoctrinate young generations? But even if the answer is yes, maybe democracy is about re-invention, creation and re-creation of the self and our communities in a way that we take responsibility for our meaning and policy making in our every day lives. Digital media offer new possibilities by being “dialogical” and groups with less power that can use them such as young people could enlarge their political “power”.

Education, which used to be related to school and university, could become also more dialogical and flexible. Formal education could turn to a “laboratory of a polis” instead of restricting civic education to the transmission of knowledge for a world that seems to be out of reach, or that does not concern young people’s everyday life (Coleman, 2006). Concerning the future, the way the different actors will interact, the role of specific events and their symbolic power, could show if we take the direction of greater autonomy for self and society. However, the risk of higher degrees of flexibility could be overwhelming for persons or groups who seek ready-made ideological and heteronomous ways to relate to one another.

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Getting to know Web 2.0

The technological innovations that have enabled what we call Web 2.0, or the Read/Write Web, are perhaps best understood in the context of the costs of contribution to the earlier incarnations of the World Wide Web. In the early days of the web, which we can call Web 1.0, posting information online was expensive, time-consuming, and required specialized knowledge. One had to register a domain name, hire a hosting server, learn HTML, and use FTP tools to upload files to a Web server in order to put a page on the World Wide Web. These barriers were not overwhelming, hobbyists could learn the skills and commit the resources to participate, but as a result of these barriers, only a tiny portion of the community which used the web was responsible for providing the content. Most people just went to read, and then later, as bandwidth grew, to listen and watch.

Over time, web developers increasingly added functionality to websites that allowed people to more easily contribute content to the web. Some of the earliest of these sites were discussion boards, a feature of the internet from even the days before the web, which allowed multiple users to easily contribute information to the web without needing to learn how to program in HTML or register a domain. These simple discussion spaces embodied the crucial design principle that has driven the development of Web 2.0: make it as simple, as time-cheap, and inexpensive as possible for ordinary Web users to contribute. We’ll soon turn to how this principle has found expression in a diverse variety of platforms – blogs, wikis, podcasts, social networks, virtual worlds – but first it’s worth teasing out the significance of designing for simplified contributions.

Lowering the costs of communicating and barriers to participation

To sum up the Web 2.0 phenomena in a sentence: lower communication costs have led to opportunities for more inclusive, collaborative, democratic online participation. Economists would say that when developers made it easier to contribute to the web, they were lowering the interaction costs of communication. As the costs of communicating online decreased, more people, millions more, decided that it was worth their while to participate in these communication networks. These people did not just communicate more, they started communicating in qualitatively different ways than before. As these millions found new media for expression and collaboration, they opened possibilities for a more inclusive, open, democratic society, possibilities which may or may not be realized. Understanding these social possibilities requires better understanding the technical design principle that has enabled them.

The dramatically lower costs of communicating information over the web can be illustrated with a simple thought experiment: how would you share a video with all of your friends in 1980 and today? In 1980, sharing a video message with your friends would involve the following steps: filming on a tape, transferring the tape to VHS, copying each individual VHS tape, packaging and addressing each tape, and mailing the tape to everyone you know. The time costs of such a venture were basically prohibitively high. People certainly had an interest in seeing each other’s video clips – recall the remarkable run of Bob Saget and America’s Funniest Home Videos – but they were simply too expensive to share within individual social networks.

Now consider the costs of adding video to YouTube. Click: I start my Web Cam, and I spout wisdom. Click: I save it. Click: I open YouTube. Click: I upload the file. Click: I label it with a “tag” so that others can find it (tagging is discussed further below). And for bonus points, Click: I change my Facebook status update to alert everyone in my social network that I’ve just added a video. There is some degree of learning curve to figure out how all of these applications and services work. But as people learn their way around one Web 2.0 service, they realize that Web 2.0 tools share many common features and it is increasingly easy to learn the next. Compared to the economic costs of these kinds of interactions in the past, global communication today is almost impossibly free.

Lowering communication costs doesn’t just lead to more communication, it leads to qualitatively different behavior by web users. For instance, it turns out that if you make it extremely time-cheap to contribute an article to an online encyclopedia, that people will create a Wikipedia with 2.5 million of them. It also turns out that if you make the editorial process decentralized and consensual, that people will anonymously and collaboratively edit those same 2.5 million articles and come to editorial loggerheads over only a tiny percentage of them. It turns out that if you make it time-cheap to post short updates about your day and read at a glance all of the updates of your friends and colleagues, that millions will start following the daily and hourly turns of people’s lives through tools like Facebook and Twitter (both to be discussed further). By itself, little updates like “Struggling with my statistics assignment,” are rather dull and prosaic. But aggregated into thousands of little updates, friends are tracking each other’s lives through Web 2.0 tools much more closely than has ever been possible by all but the closest social and working relationships. As a final example, the ease of producing and sharing online videos has allowed for the new social phenomena of viral videos, publically available online videos which are seen by hundreds of thousands or millions of people, which are typically created, published, and distributed outside of the traditional studio/publisher information networks. Because cheaper communication allows new communication media and practices, we have a whole new set of shared cultural texts created and distributed outside of the traditional, hierarchical publication networks.

Lowering the interaction costs of communication leads to perhaps the most important feature of Web 2.0: its inclusive, collaborative capacity. The new Read/Write web is allowing people to work together, share information, and reach new and potentially enormous audiences outside some of the traditional structures of power, authority, and communication in our society. The social developments that have resulted from the Web 2.0 phenomena are best understood through a lens of democratization, but we must keep in mind the caveat that democracy means many different things in many different places (Haste and Hogan, 2006). Democratizing the web may mean one thing for the wealthy in the West with instant access to the web through wireless-connected laptop computers, and another thing for the poor in the West who access the web through public connections in schools and libraries (Jenkins, 2007). Democratizing the web may mean one thing for students in rural Africa with dial-up modem connections on cast off computers from Europe, and another thing for bloggers in China whose content is scrutinized by an army of government censors and language police. While democratization may mean different things in these diverse areas, certain commonalities hold as well. More people are getting involved in a series of increasingly global conversations, more people have the capacity to share their thoughts and insights to the world, and more people have the capacity to weigh in on the value and virtue of media and commentary. In older media forms the boundaries between authorship and readership, speaker and listener, producer and consumer remained quite clear. “The new Web”, as professor Leon Watts notes “has broken down the authorship-readership roles into degrees of contact and reciprocation of infinitely variable granularity” (Personal Communication). In decentralizing the control over the flow of global information, Web 2.0 holds tremendous potential to shift the balance of power from the elite to the masses, with all of the chaos, creativity, exceptionality and mediocrity that have marked the expansion of political democracy.

Whether or not this potential is realized, whether or not the key Web 2.0 design principle of simplify contributing leads to gains in democratization depends on how developers, publishers, telecommunications companies and users negotiate the evolving spaces that allow for all this communication. Before considering possible scenarios for the future impact of Web 2.0 platforms on society, we should now examine what some of these platforms are and how they are evolving.

Instantiations of Web 2.0

Web 2.0 technologies may be animated by a single design principle, simplify contributing, but they take a wide array of forms. Some of the most visible Web 2.0 tools are categories of platforms. One of the first platforms of the Read/Write Web was Web logs, or blogs, which are websites that are like public journals. Blog authors, or bloggers, post chronologically-ordered journal entries to a site, and each entry has a feature that allows readers to comment, allowing for two-way interaction. Blog hosting services like Blogger, now owned by Google, developed around the turn of the century and allowed even people without any programming skills to create and publish blogs. Wikis, websites which are authored by a community of people, emerged as another platform that allowed for easy, collaborative publication of information. The most famous wiki, Wikipedia, is authored by millions of anonymous contributors, and indeed anyone can click on any page in Wikipedia at any time and add anything that they so desire. Podcasting tools allowed for the uploading and syndication of audio files, and podcasts are a kind of audio blog. YouTube pioneered online video sharing by creating a space where people could upload small video files and make them publically available. These diverse spaces have fostered new forms of global, multimedia, communication and publication.

Online social networks also fall within the domain of Web 2.0. In America, the two largest sites are MySpace and Facebook, where users create a web page profile, invite friends to connect to their profile, and use the page as a space to publish personal content and connect with friends and co-workers. While broad scale online social networks are the most well known, niche social networks exist as well, and services like Ning allow users to create their own mini online social networks, such as Classroom 2.0, a social network for educators interested in Web 2.0. Virtual worlds, including online games, are, to some degree, other forms of online social networks, where users create avatars which inhabit three-dimensional virtual worlds. Second Life is the largest online virtual world community, and World of Warcraft, with over 10 million members worldwide, is the world’s largest online game community. Both virtual worlds are also integrated with other forms of Web 2.0 tools like discussion boards, blogs, and wikis.

For those who have not closely followed the growth of Web 2.0, the scale of adoption is staggering. In America in 2006, over 50% of teenagers – across racial and socioeconomic lines – have created pages on online social networks like Facebook and MySpace, and in all likelihood this percentage has increased in the last two years (Lenhart, Madden, Macgill, and Smith, 2007). As of October 2008, Wikipedia had over 2.5 million pages, over 250 million page edits, over 8 million registered users, and over 150,000 people who had made an edit in the last 30 days. In February of 2008 Technorati was tracking over 112 million blogs, which doesn’t include as many as 73 million Chinese blogs (Helmond 2008). Even in the US education sector, which was rated dead last out of 30 sectors in technology adoption by the Department of Commerce in 2003, Web 2.0 is growing exponentially. PBwiki reports hosting over 250,000 education related wikis; Wikispaces reports that they have given away over 100,000 free wikis to K12 educators and they plan on donating 250,000 more; and Edublogs hosts over 100,000 education related blogs. And while these are statistics from some of the largest Web 2.0 service providers, they represent only a fraction of online applications within the education sector.

Web 2.0 refers to these simple, often free tools for adding content to the Web, but it also refers to systems that allow users to evaluate content. Tagging refers to the process of allowing users to apply key word labels to discrete bits of content. The service del.icio.us, for instance, allows users to tag Web sites such that del.icio.us community can bypass search engines like Google and instead search the Web using user-generated key words. This form of content organization has been dubbed “folksonomy,” a taxonomy generated organically by a community. Tagging is an essential feature of many Web 2.0 content sharing sites, like Flikr, a popular service for sharing photos.

Indeed this kind of convergence is one of the most common features in the evolution of Web 2.0 tools. User-generated videos from YouTube are embedded in wikis; podcasts are hosted by blogs, commerce sites like Amazon.com allow users to tag products and post reviews. Facebook attempts to serve as an individual’s one-stop Web 2.0 hub, allowing users to chat, post updates, blog, share links, host photos, share videos, coordinate events, share music, and so forth. As Web 2.0 develops, many features of the various platforms are converging and overlapping.

The development of Web 2.0 is also characterized by new innovations. Right now in America, one of the fastest growing Web 2.0 services is Twitter, which allows for micro-blogging. Users post, either online or through mobile phones, status updates of 160 characters or less. Individually, most posts are trivial. Taken collectively, they allow users to track the daily ebb and flow of another person’s life, creating a remarkable sense of intimacy and familiarity (Thompson, 2008). Twitter is now being integrated with Facebook and other tools, so that microblogging is just now entering the Web 2.0 milieu.

The ownership of these diverse spaces deserves careful consideration. Many of these platforms are created and managed by teams of volunteers who release their products under licenses like GNU or creative commons that allow others to share and build upon their achievements. Wikipedia is run by a non-profit agency funded by user donations, Wordpress gives away their blogging platform, and MediaWiki gives away a wiki platform. Other platforms are proprietary and for profit: Google owns Blogger and YouTube, Rupert Murdoch owns MySpace, and so forth. The transmission of data that enables these communications is made possible by telecommunications companies that are regulated by governments around the world. In many dimensions, the newly enabled communications of millions of users depend upon the infrastructure provided by corporations and governments, and the boundaries and possibilities of new communications will be negotiated by users, corporate interests and governments. Corporations may seek to constrain communications in ways that maximize profits and governments may seek to constrain communications in ways that maximize state control. Whether or not the democratic possibilities of Web 2.0 are realized depends a great deal upon the degree to which users can negotiate for freedom and autonomy within the networks created and controlled by established political and corporate interests.

The broad future direction of Web 2.0

The driving force behind Web 2.0, the desire to lower the costs of communication, will continue to be a force shaping the web in the decades ahead, and innovations in time-cheap communications are going to present a future full of new surprises. Three other trends at various levels will continue to act on and shape this driving force. First, new platforms will continue to emerge. Second, the functionality in platforms will continue to converge. Third, we should expect to see greater integration between Web 2.0 tools and handheld devices. Finally, we should consider the efforts to those who seek not to extend the Web 2.0 regime, but to transcend it.

Platforms

It’s hard to guess which web communication platforms are going to stick and which are going to fall to the wayside – the book has been pretty durable, the 8-track less so – but we can make some guesses. To step back and think broadly for a moment, platforms are essentially defined by their level of automation. Automation makes certain communication acts time-cheaper, but automation also acts as a constraint on communication forms. Blogs are highly automated. They take new posts and new comments, and they place them in chronological order. This means that making an online journal with collaborative comments is quite time-cheap, but it also means that it’s difficult to make a blog anything other than an online journal. Wikis, by contrast, are the blank canvases of the online world. Almost nothing is automated in a wiki, and so they have a tremendously flexible format which is much more time-expensive to manually design.

Blogs and wikis are two of the formats which seem to have a great potential to prove quite durable. The free, flexible nature of the wiki means that it will likely continue to be suitable for innovative new structural arrangements. The enduring nature of the journal across time and cultures suggests that blogs will long have a place. Likely developers will find new ways to make communication within these platforms cheaper and easier, but these durable platforms seem well-poised to endure.

Some of the more proprietary platforms are perhaps more vulnerable to replacement. Online social networks are probably going to persist in the decades ahead, but five years ago one might have predicted that MySpace would dominate in America, whereas Facebook has begun to very successfully compete broadly with MySpace, especially amongst the demographic of Americans with higher levels of education. As more adults join Facebook, it may be that youth look to escape to a new network (Friending your parents is very uncomfortable… not friending your parents even more so), and perhaps a new space will be born.

Undoubtedly new platforms will also emerge as people develop new ways to make certain forms of communication time-cheap. Some of these may be rather obvious in retrospect, like Goodreads, which allows readers to share lists of what they are reading, lists of their favourite books, and lists of the books on their to-read list. Others applications, like Twitter, may appear quite strange as they appear because they represent new forms of social communication.

Convergence

Virtually all wiki platforms have built-in discussion boards. The Wordpress blog editor has a built-in static web page creator and publisher. Facebook integrates seamlessly with Twitter and a 1,000 other applications. Podcasts can be distributed through blogs. Platforms which began as serving one particular function are increasingly being combined and woven into other platforms. Teens used to send instant messages through systems like AOL Instant Messenger, but increasingly chat online through integrated chat in Gmail or Facebook. In America, Facebook seems well posed to be the primary launching point to the Web 2.0 world for many Americans, and other services like the start page for Google Apps is competing for the same title of home base. Some of the clear distinctions which now exist among platforms may cease to exist as tools increasingly adopt the functionality of other tools.

Handheld devices

Gcast is a service that allows any phone user to dial a phone number, record a message, and have that message published as a podcast within minutes. Jott is a service that transcribes and emails or publishes phone messages. Twitter updates can be made and read by text message, email, or on the web.

As handheld devices develop more sophisticated interfaces, increased functionality, and the ability to transmit more information more quickly, it’s likely that handhelds are going to make Web 2.0 platforms increasingly portable. Right now the clunkiness of thumb pads, the small sizes of screens, and the low bandwidth of mobile phones are limiting their integration into Web 2.0 platforms. It’s not time-cheap to add an article to Wikipedia through your mobile if you have to type out a whole article with your thumb and can only read 20 words of it at a time on your screen. However, as developers overcome these hurdles, mobile phones and other handheld devices will increasingly become integrated into the Read/Write web. At some level, this will simply mean more communication, but we should also expect qualitatively different forms of communication to emerge as well.

Web 3.0 and beyond…

Predicting the “knight’s move,” the radical changes that will reshape social phenomena is always a difficult task, though in the realm of science and technology we at least have the advantage that researchers and developers who are working on new breakthroughs are toiling in plain sight. Tim Berners-Lee, for instance, one of the founders of the World Wide Web, has been working for some time on developing tools to allow a “Semantic Web,” or a version of the web where computers would be able recognize the meaning of data at some level (Berners-Lee, Hendler and Lassila 2001). For instance, search engines can currently find every web page where the word “cat” appears. Clever programmers can even get computers to recognize that the work “cat” appears so frequently with the word “pet” that those words probably have some relationship. Computers cannot however, know what cat means or figure out that cats are a subset of pets. In the Semantic Web, computers would be able to identify these types of relationships, and thus one could do a web search for the phrase “all the types of pets” and the computer would not merely search for websites with those exact words, but would search throughout the data of the web to find all of the data considered a subset of pet, and then return that data to the user. Such a web would dramatically increase the meaning-making capacity of computers, allowing humans to focus even more of their time and energy on higher order thinking tasks, just as search engines on the web have allowed humans to find massive amounts of information in much less time.

Web 2.0 across the sectors

No facet of modern life will remain untransformed by the innovations of the Web 2.0. That’s a strong claim, but in the face of the scope and scale of the social transformations wrought by Web 2.0, it increasingly appears to be a defensible one. Across nearly every sector of the world, Web 2.0 is changing the way people interact and relate.

Business

Web 2.0 tools are sparking two major changes in business practices: how employees collaborate, and how businesses interact with customers. At the MathWorks near Boston, MA, software engineers are designing their entire products on wikis. Programmers no longer email snippets of code back and forth as they attempt to create and debug new features. Instead, programmers post their work to a wiki, which allows the entire MathWorks engineering community ready access to the entire database of code for their products. At BestBuy, the sales force of “Blue Shirts” participates in an online social network called Blue Shirt Nation, where employees can share strategies, give feedback to management, react to new products and campaigns, and help to shape the overall direction of the company (Li and Bernoff, 2008).

These practices represent both new efficiencies and new relationships within firms, and as of this moment it’s not yet clear which of these innovations will prove transformative. New efficiencies produced by collaborative work environments may be merely useful or they may be essential. Can a consumer durable retailer which has not harnessed the collective intelligence of its sales force compete with one who has? We may find that in certain economic sectors harnessing collective intelligence is more important than in other places, or we may find that firms who can use new Web 2.0 tools to empower their employees consistently out-compete those who do not.

Online networks may also upset hierarchical corporate structures. Will online communities within firms represent a new avenue for employee advancement? Will the Best Buy sales rep with the highest numbers be passed over for manager in favour of another employee who made several critical contributions to Blue Shirt Nation? Will the MathWorks wiki allow the most creative, productive programmers to be identified and recognized for their work, rather than the project manager who compiles and presents the final project to executives? These new platforms may allow different kinds of talents – talents related to online networking, communication and collaboration – to be more highly valued in the work place. They also may allow for employees at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy to more easily bend the ear of those at the top, and the examples of both Linux development and the Toyota production system lend support to this hypothesis (Evans and Wolf, 2005). These flatter, more democratic, more meritocratic social organizations may allow firms to draw out the strengths of their employees with less regard towards their position in the organization.

Lowering communication costs is also likely to accelerate the pace of globalization and outsourcing. As it becomes increasingly easier to collaborate online, both asynchronously and in real time, firms can employ people around the world and have those teams work together. For developing countries, this represents an incredible new opportunity for nations that can build the infrastructure for people to participate in this phenomena. For developed countries, it means greater competition in the global labour market.

Web 2.0 tools are also changing the ways that firms interact with consumers. For one rather silly example, take the case of the American film “Snakes on a Plane.” When New Line Cinema published that title amongst their list of films in development in 2005, it captured the attention of a segment of film buffs on the internet. Perhaps it was the way the title succinctly captures the central conflict of the film; perhaps it unlocked some deep psychological tensions around flying in post 9/11 America. In any event, blogs about the film sprouted, fans started generating and sharing content about a film that had not even been created yet. Fans knew that Samuel L. Jackson was to play a lead role, and one fan produced a sound clip where he imitated Jackson saying “I want these motherfucking snakes off the motherfucking plane!” The clip went viral – it spread rapidly through social networks and outside traditional publication channels – amongst fans of this yet-to-be movie, and the fans demanded that the line be added to the movie. So the studio went back into production in order to add the line, which became the signature moment of the film.

That moment represents a powerful symbolic change in the relationship between producers and consumers. The fans were not the simple recipients of the movie; instead, they helped to design the film. They were co-constructors of the product, and through that co-construction not only did they improve the product (in a marketing sense, if not an artistic one), but they also felt a greater sense of investment in the product. These fans, with their blogs, fan sites, and media clips, became a free marketing arm for New Line, and produced a buzz around the movie that few campy B-movies can hope to achieve.

Web 2.0 tools allow many variations on these kinds of two-way communication amongst firms and consumers. At Snorg T’s, about 1/3 of their ideas for new t-shirts, sold over the internet, come from consumers. At threadless.com, consumers not only submit t-shirt designs but vote on the ones that they want the company to produce, market and sell. Companies as diverse as Dell and Stonyfield Farms use blogs to talk and listen to consumers (Scoble and Israel, 2006). Proctor and Gamble launched Beinggirl.com as a space for girls to talk with each other and with health care professionals about issues of relationships and sexuality, sponsored throughout by advertisements for beauty and feminine care products (Li and Bernoff, 2008). As I write this, JetBlue airways has just announced its first flight from its new terminal at JFK via Twitter, sending the message directly to its 6,000 followers on Twitter. In these conversations, firms not only have the chance to learn from their consumers, but also to communicate directly with them, unfiltered through the media. In the best of circumstances, firms can help consumers feel like partners in the life of corporate products; consumers become part of the team.

Looking towards the future, if all that corporations do with these tools is find new ways to sell their products, then that won’t constitute a significant change in the economic sphere. If companies, however, go further in terms of listening to consumers, towards building partnerships with them, towards responding to their concerns and ideas, then we may see new ways for the marketplace to better serve consumers. If firms discover that they can draw strength from the ideas of consumers, that they can grow by building partnerships from consumers, and that they are vulnerable to widespread, online criticism of consumers, then that may shift the balance of power in capitalist society from the producers towards the consumers.

An alternative future where producers simply use Web 2.0 as a new medium to share advertising and propaganda with consumers is equally imaginable. BeingGirl.com may develop as an open forum where girls have a chance to speak with each other and with professionals about the challenging issues of adolescence, and Proctor and Gamble may get some incidental benefits from fostering this open space. On the other hand, Proctor and Gamble can exert powerful editorial controls over the content on BeingGirl in order to manipulate conversations towards the celebration of P&G products and the positioning of young girls as deficient beings without those products. We have to expect that Proctor and Gamble only cares about the interests of young girls to the extent that those interests coincide with their fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder profit. In these corporate sponsored spaces, which include Blogger, Facebook, MySpace, and many others, users and corporations will negotiate the norms of each space, and in the best possible future these negotiations will result in consumers working with producers to create a better marketplace. In the worst possible future, producers will use online spaces as a forum for cynical advertising to penetrate ever more deeply into the lives of consumers.

Politics and the civic sphere

Those who research the emerging Web trends in society are going to spend a considerable amount of time unpacking the role of the internet and other communication technologies in the Barack Obama presidential campaign. The Obama campaign reached out to voters through a wide variety of existing web platforms. The campaign has pages and groups on a variety of social network sites, posts regular updates on Twitter (where Obama has 100,000 followers), posts videos on YouTube, uploads pictures from the campaign trail to Flickr, and participates in other niche platforms like Faithbase and BlackPlanet. After Obama’s victory, we have good reason to believe that Web 2.0 tools will be an established feature of political campaigns.

The Obama campaign built a proprietary online community of over 1,000,000 members called my.barackobama.com (myBO). Users at myBO could join groups based on states, neighbourhood or interests (like Tango dancers or air traffic controllers). They signed up to contact local undecided voters in their neighborhood and received “Walk lists” in seconds. Users could create a fundraising page which tracked their efforts at getting friends and family to donate to the campaign, and they could create their own blogs with which to share their thoughts with others. While myBO posed a number of strong constraints within the network in order to maintain their message and brand, they allowed remarkable freedom to users in creating their own blogs and fundraising messages. These messages were screened, and objectionable language was removed and led to users being banned, but on the whole the campaign allowed users to craft their own personal message of support in the service of a shared goal.

All of these messages were also shared outside the bounds of the official Obama network. In some cases, users shared the Obama message by posting Obama updates to their own social network profile, or sharing YouTube videos from the campaign by email. At the same time, Obama supporters also took ownership of his message and created their own groups and communication platforms. Many people individually created their own blogs or groups, like the Obama-Mama blog or the Facebook group “I have more foreign policy experience than Sarah Palin.”

These tools allowed the Obama campaign to achieve two objectives. First, they used communication tools to speak directly to millions of voters and potential voters without being filtered through the media. The decision to announce Obama pick for V.P. via text message at an early morning hour allowed the Obama campaign to send their message directly to the voters, rather than mediated through some kind of press release or press conference. Consider the costs of sending all of the words, images and videos distributed by the Obama campaign through a combination of media ads and direct mailing: it would be a staggering sum. The costs of transmitting these materials become entirely manageable using the web, and in fact, Obama volunteers and supporters absorbed much of the cost of those interactions.

The role of volunteers in sharing the message speaks to the second online objective achieved through Web 2.0 tools: getting a small army of grass-roots supporters involved in the campaign. The online tools dramatically reduced the cost of mobilizing huge numbers of volunteers and supporters. Those volunteers worked both through official channels, like those who volunteered to print out Obama walk lists, and through unofficial channels, like those who posted an Obama video to their social network profile or blog outside of myBO. The Obama campaign’s online efforts gave supporters an online stake in the campaign and even gave them some control over personally shaping their version of the Obama message. By sharing this stake, the campaign unlocked entirely new bases of small donors, of volunteers, and of new voters.

While the Obama campaign is certainly the most prominent example of online civic mobilization, many other examples exist as well. On February 12, 2003, the largest coordinated protest in human history occurred across the world in opposition to the Iraq war, where somewhere between 12 and 20 million people took to the streets (Bennett, 2007). The protest was organized in a matter of months, and online communication played a critical role. At www.350.org, activists are mobilizing people to demand action on greenhouse gas emissions and reduce atmospheric carbon down to 350 ppm. At 350.org people can join the movement, find out about upcoming actions, organize their own actions and spread the word. Facebook has an application where individuals can create profiles dedicated to causes, where people can invite their friends to donate to or join in an action or effort. These tools will play an increasingly important role in grass-roots action over the decades ahead.

Just as we could imagine two alternative futures for Web 2.0 tools in the economic sphere – one which enhanced consumer power and one which co-opted consumer energy in the service of corporate power, so can we imagine two futures for these new political media. Whether you believe that Barack Obama is The One, That One, or just the next one, one has to assume that he’ll be under constant pressure to use his online network as a tool for generating support for his agenda rather than as a medium for developing his agenda. If myBO becomes another media for the Obama administration to spread a centrally constructed message, then it becomes another instrument of elite political power. If, however, myBO morphs into my.americangovernment.gov, a space where citizens have the opportunity to contribute and collaborate on solving problems and speaking truth to power, then the democratizing power of Web 2.0 tools may indeed lead to a more democratic republic. Given the pressure on politicians to consolidate their power, one has to assume that the better future will only come about if the citizenry organizes to demand that it happen.

Journalism and the media are also being profoundly affected by the emergence of Web 2.0 tools. In some cases, new media are simply being integrated into old media. Many New York Times columns are also published as blogs, and readers can comment back on the blogs, and columnists can respond to those responses in future columns. Certainly this kind of dialogue happened with letters in the past, but the communication is now faster and at a greater scale. More importantly, anyone can now read almost all of the comments left behind by others, so nearly the entire communication stream is publically available. The editorial control over the “letters to the editor” is greatly loosened, so hundreds of comments are published rather than just a few letters. Anyone who is willing to avoid vitriolic personal attacks and foul or hateful language can have their say on the pages of NYTimes.com and dozens of other newspapers.

Web 2.0 tools also allow new journalism platforms to emerge outside of the traditional media. The Drudge Report and the Daily Kos are two examples of partisan blog networks providing political news and opinion outside of the traditional corporate journalism structure. Blogs that provide coverage of niches, like particular celebrities, trends, or market sectors, have proven to be particularly successful in finding readerships in the media marketplace. In some cases, this citizen journalism has proven to be a powerful check on the mainstream media, such as when bloggers discovered and then demonstrated that documents that Dan Rather used to criticize George W. Bush’s Texas Air Guard record were fabricated. In other cases, Web 2.0 tools have been the source of media stories, such as when Senator George Allen called a young Indian man a Macaca at a campaign event, a racial slur which was captured on video and published on YouTube for the media to pick up on. Web 2.0 tools have both allowed new voices into journalism, and they have created a new bank of user-generated media to inform journalism. Established media conglomerates will undoubtedly attempt to harness, control and profit from these new domains, but the ease of creating and publishing widely available media suggests that media consumers will have a far wider array of media choices in the future, and they will have more opportunities to interact with others in national and international conversations about news events.

Relationships and identity

Friend is now a verb. To “friend” someone is to solicit or accept an invitation from another person on an online social network that denotes that person as one of your friends. In this context, friends are not necessarily friends as in other contexts. Friends may be acquaintances from school or work rather than people who you choose to have a social, affectionate relationship with. Yet the power of these online friendships is that Web 2.0 tools can allow them to have a degree of intimacy that offline friendships may not necessarily have.

For instance, this past summer I took a group of students to India. While in India, I left new status updates from the road, and when I returned I posted a series of photo albums to my Facebook site. I have several very dear, close, offline friends who know nothing about this trip; we have not been in touch since then. I also have several acquaintances in my Facebook network who I have not spoken to in years, who I don’t feel particularly emotionally close to, who followed this expedition quite closely. If I run into them, they can ask about what it was like to cross the high pass at 16,000 feet in the India Himalaya or about my relationship with Lado, the Indian mechanic who helped us with our service project. In several important respects, my Facebook friends know the shifting landscape of my moods, activities, and journey through life better than some of my offline friends with whom I have close emotional bonds but only a weak sense of the contours of their current life. For those outside the world online social networks, it’s easy to imagine that Facebook friends aren’t real friends. But when I look at who understands my life right now, the question “who are my real friends?” becomes much more complicated. In a sense, I have a whole new category of friends with whom I share a whole new category of intimacy. Social capital theory gives us a robust framework to understand how these relationships work as weak ties (Putnam, 2000), but social capital theory in its present form does not necessarily account for the significance of the new levels of intimacy that I have development with my acquaintances. As online social networks transform our social landscape, fundamental and remarkably durable notions of relationships and identity may evolve.

For many young people especially, the online world now is a parallel social space to the offline world. Just as teenagers carefully cultivate an image in school, through dress, activities, friendships, and conversations, so do teens carefully cultivate a second image offline. In shaping their MySpace or Facebook page, teenagers carefully choose which photos of themselves to display, what books and movies to list as their favorites, who to accept and reject as friends, and what other information and images should adorn their “profile.” Just as students may express one identity in the classroom, another in church, and another on the basketball court, so students can experiment with new identities online. In many cases, the lack of instant social feedback from acts of identity-shaping may allow people to be bolder in experimenting with self-expression; you might be taunted immediately for wearing an Arsenal jersey in the halls of a Manchester high school, but you have some insulation from insults if you post a picture of Adebayor on your profile, at least until your online friends find you. Certain online spaces are specifically designed for this identity experimentation and role-play. James Gee, writing about video games, describes the capacity to create “projective identities” in virtual worlds like World of Warcraft or Second Life, where people can experiment with designing new identities for virtual representations, or avatars, of themselves (Gee, 2007). These games, which require communication not only in game, but through other mechanisms like guild sites, forums, wikis, and blogs, allow people to experiment with new identities in new domains.

Exploration of how these online networks are reforming notions of identity has only just begun, but as one example of the changing social landscape consider the notion of persistence. The mobility of modern life in the West has allowed many people the opportunity to “start over” with a new identity. High school kids go off to college, people change jobs, switch schools, move to a different town. Someone who tires of being the class clown in middle school can try to shape a new identity in a new high school; someone who was a chess nerd in high school can join a party fraternity in college. Part of what enables these new experiments is the chance to abandon an old identity. But what happens to the nature of these changes if people travel from one offline social world to another while maintaining a consistent online social identity? What does it mean to have a single Facebook page from middle school through one’s working life? Is one’s Facebook profile sufficiently malleable to allow significant changes in identity, or does the durable nature of one’s public, online identity constrain people’s efforts to experiment as someone new? Some initial research suggests that the complexity of privacy setting tools in Facebook restricts people’s ability to maintain old ties while entering new communities with different expectations, but we have much more to learn (DiMicco and Millen 2007). Answering these questions will be critical to psychologists and other social scientists, to educators and parents, and to young people in the years ahead.

Over time, the English language has developed such that “virtual” is the antonym of “real,” and if social scientists accept this opposition, they will miss some of the most important phenomena developing in modern social relationships. Relationships developed in virtual or online worlds are not pale reflections of “real” world phenomena. They are a new class of meaningful and profound interactions which researchers will have to consider seriously as they try to understand the evolving nature of society in a Web 2.0 world.

Education

On the slow pace of adoption

There is a subversive joke told amongst education technology advocates that if Rip van Winkle awoke today, he wouldn’t recognize or understand the work in an architect’s office where the drawings are done by AutoCAD, in a mechanic’s garage where computers run diagnostic tests, or at a retail counter where sales are made and tracked by computer. All of these places and interactions would be radically different from the world the Rip fell asleep in, but if Mr. van Winkle walked into a classroom where students were sitting in rows listening to teachers lecture by the blackboard, then Rip would finally feel right at home.

As Web 2.0 technologies reshape nearly every aspect of modern life, their adoption has been relatively slow within the classroom. “Relatively” needs to be put into perspective: three providers alone, PBWiki, Wikispaces, and Edublogs claim to host nearly half a million education-related blogs and wikis. In all likelihood, millions more are hosted on other large public services, on course-management systems like Moodle or Blackboard, on proprietary systems for particular schools, and through other means, though there is no certain way to count. So on the one hand, in terms of raw numbers we are seeing an exponential growth in the adoption of Web 2.0 tools in the classroom, and on the other hand we are seeing very little evidence that this adoption is penetrating normal classroom routines. Reconciling this tension will help us understand the present and future of these tools in the classroom.

Hypothesised benefits

Very little academic research has centered on Web 2.0 tools in education. From the literature that does exists though, one can unearth hypothesized benefits for using Web 2.0 tools in the classroom with students, which can be organized into four major categories. The first category involves increasing engagement. On the one hand, we have some evidence that by allowing students to publish in a public space over which they have some control and ownership, students are motivated by the chance to work in Web 2.0 environments. Several small studies and experiments suggest that students who write using these technologies write longer pieces, write more frequently, claim to take greater pride in their work, and claim to enjoy the process more (Cole, 2004; Dunleavy, Dexter, and Heinecke, 2007; Grant, 2006; Olander, 2007). Students enjoy the chance to use tools in schools that they use socially in the rest of their lives, and they enjoy the opportunities to connect and collaborate (Reich, 2008) . They are also pressured, usually in a positive way, to perform better when their work is public. They appreciate opportunities to connect with the world outside their classroom. At the same time educators also have observed that Web 2.0 tools allow increased participation in class discussions, since those who struggle to communicate orally have another avenue to contribute (Ellis, Goodyear, Prosser, and O’Hara, 2006; Reich, 2008).

Building on this increased engagement, Web 2.0 tools provide new avenues to teach fundamental skills, like writing, communication, collaboration, and new media literacy. One small recent study showed that students who blogged improved their writing skills more than students who completed assignments by hand or through word-processing (Roth, 2007). The author argued that these gains were largely connected to motivation, and while the sample of the study may be small, the results are suggestive if not conclusive. Another recent study showed that students may learn reasoning skills in online communication with their peers more than they learn such skills when modeled by adult instructors (Ellis et al 2006). The capacity of these tools to nurture collaboration skills has been noted by several authors (Reich and Daccord, 2008; Richardson, 2008) who argue that the communally-constructed nature of Web 2.0 spaces forces students to figure out how to work together to create final products. Several researchers have investigated the promises and challenges to use Web 2.0 tools to develop these kinds of collaboration skills (Armetta, 2007; Coyle, 2007). In addition to these established skills, other researchers, like Henry Jenkins at MIT, have noted that the proliferation of new media has necessitated learning a whole new set of literacies, like understanding distributed cognition and transmedia navigation, and of course it makes sense to study new media literacies in the context of new media platforms (Jenkins, 2007).

In addition to developing both old and new fundamental skills, students also need to rehearse for 21^st century situations. As noted above, businesses are adopting Web 2.0 tools at an astounding rate, and students in schools need to have access to the communication media that are at least similar to the types of environments that they will be expected to use in the future (Laurinen and Marttunen, 2007). In one specific example, several researchers have noted that most classroom writing instruction looks absolutely nothing like the kinds of writing that employees are expected to do in the work force. Collaborative writing where iterations are workshopped by multiple people using online media are the norm in many workplaces, whereas these practices are the rare exception in education (Garza and Hern, 2005). Researchers have also recognized that collaborative digital media is an increasingly important part of the civic sphere, both nationally and globally, and Civic Life Online (2008) provides numerous examples both of how people are organizing in the 21^st century to meet civic goals and some early efforts to ready students to participate in these new efforts (Bennett, 2007).

Underlying all of these proposed benefits is the notion that the normal routine of school life is insufficient for preparing students for the new labour force and civic sphere. As Levy and Murnane (2004) argue, computers are increasingly replacing many of the repetitive tasks that used to be performed by significant parts of the human labour force. As a result, schools need to prepare students with new skills where humans have a comparative advantage over computers, especially in terms of complex communication and critical thinking. Since Web 2.0 tools offer new mechanisms for teaching these critical skills which schools so often fail to teach, emerging Web tools can enlighten the critique of the contemporary state of education. The best Web 2.0 projects, which we will turn to in a moment, demonstrate the extraordinary capacity for communication tools to enrich our learning, especially in contrast to an educational system grounded in print technology and an industrial infrastructure. While technology may play a role in highlighting the needs for change, technology alone will not provide reform. As Prof. Barry Fishman has argued, “Technology needs school reform more than school reform needs technology” (Personal Communication).

The potential and reality of Web 2.0 tools

The best instantiations of Web 2.0 tools are extraordinary, and the bulk are, unfortunately, quite ordinary and quite well suited for fairly standard instructional models.

There are hundreds of exemplary examples of Web 2.0 projects (many of which can be found at edublogawards.com), and I’ll highlight just one here. The Flat Classroom Project of 2007, hosted at flatclasroomproject.wikispaces.com, was a collaboration amongst eight classrooms in America, Shanghai, Austria, Qatar, and India. Students in the classroom were divided into 10 teams of students from around the world in order to study the 10 world flatteners from Thomas Friedman’s book The World is Flat (Friedman, 2007). Each team took one of the world flatteners and explored its impact by creating a wiki page which included video, images, and collaboratively composed text. The videos were shot in one country and then “outsourced” to another for editing, so a student might film something in Qatar to be edited in America. The essays that followed the videos were written collaboratively, and the discussion pages “behind” the main project pages show the various project management, communication and teamwork skills that students needed to practice in order to successfully complete the project. In the process of designing the wiki page, students undertook a critical examination of an important phenomena and then worked together to create a multimedia performance of their understanding.

While no studies have looked widely across Web 2.0 tools, there is anecdotal evidence that this kind of project is a very rare exception to two normal states. The first normal state with Web 2.0 is failure. Of the hundreds of thousands of blogs and wikis created, most die on the vine. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as one of the advantages of Web 2.0 is that they are both inexpensive and time-cheap to create, and so one can fail repeatedly before finding a model that works. That said, these failed instantiations are not realizing any of the aforementioned hypothesized benefits. The second normal state for Web 2.0 tools are applications that fit neatly into standard, industrial models of education. In these states, a wiki might be used as an easy way for a teacher to create a website as a one-way delivery device for content, rather than a collaborative medium. Or perhaps a student creates a blog as a kind of online portfolio, but her writings are never published widely, never shared with others, or never commented upon by classmates. In a sense the blog has allowed the student to pass in her homework online, but none of the potentially benefits of publishing within a larger critical, collaborative community are realized. If these two states are indeed the norm, then right now Web 2.0 tools may offer tremendous potential for education, but this potential is not much realized.

There is also anecdotal evidence that the distribution of the use of these tools, sophisticated or not, is skewed towards wealthy, suburban communities rather than poorer rural or urban communities. In theory, free and simple Web 2.0 tools that can build learning communities within and beyond schools should be able to benefit a wide variety of students equitably. Indeed, under-resourced schools might plausibly even benefit disproportionately, since networked computing technologies can be used to bring a wide variety of intellectual resources into low-income communities, where higher-income communities can afford to bring more of those intellectual resources directly into the classroom. Unfortunately, this does not appear to be the scenario currently unfolding.

I hypothesize that the distribution of Web 2.0 tools is indeed uneven, and that schools that are more wealthy, more white, more selective, and more suburban are more likely to employ Web 2.0 teaching tools than schools where students are poorer, non-white, and from urban or rural communities. Though no empirical research has been done on this topic, my hypothesis has been shaped by anecdotal evidence from conversations with educators, online discussions amongst academic technology integrationists, and evaluations of renowned education-related wikis, blogs and social networks. At a first glance, it appears that new opportunities afforded by Web 2.0 tools are primarily available to those students with access to many other types of opportunities. Henry Jenkins (2007) has raised similar concerns around this “participation gap” between wealthy and middle class students with access to participatory online communities and working class students who are being left behind.

Moreover, I expect that there is not only a difference in the distribution of these tools, but qualitative inequities in their application. Researchers have found that instruction in poor, non-white, urban schools is dominated by didactic, teacher-centered forms of instruction, where white, suburban students enjoy more interactive, student-centered teaching (Diamond 2007). I believe that these inequities will extend into the digital domain, and that urban schools in low-income communities will use Web 2.0 tools in more teacher-centered, less collaborative ways than suburban schools in higher-income communities. Furthermore, it seems likely that this didactic instruction in under-resourced schools will be focused on training students on basic skills, and the more interactive instruction in wealthier school will involve nurturing students in the critical thinking and complex communication skills that are essential to the 21^st century (Levy and Murnane 2004). Thus in the absence of policy interventions, it may be that low-income students will have less access to educational experiences with Web 2.0 tools, and the experiences that they do have will be less collaborative, less empowering, and less relevant to the future needs of society.

Future scenarios for Web 2.0 in education

The picture painted above is a fairly gloomy picture of Web 2.0 in education: these tools have tremendous potential to nurture the skills that students will need for the 21^st century civic and economic spheres, and yet these tools remained largely under-utilized, especially in under-resourced environments. And without fairly dramatic intervention, there is no reason to believe that this will change in the future.

Educational institutions are conservative ones. In many systems, teachers are not fully professionalized, and very few systems have incentives that reward teachers for innovative instruction. A teacher who lectures at the front of the class gets paid the same as one who pours his heart into developing multimedia, cross-cultural collaborative projects. So classrooms prove remarkably resistant to change.

Changing the orientation of schools towards 21^st century skills and teaching methods would be hard enough, and it’s made even harder in America by standards-based instruction which directs schools to focus more on 19^th and 20^th century basic skills. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law forces schools, especially schools serving low-performing students, to focus on preparing students to take standardized tests in basic skills almost to the exclusion of every other goal. Within schools who feel threatened by the NCLB regime, there is a strong disincentive to focus on 21^st century skills that will not be measured by standardized tests. The principle at work in America and applicable across all contexts is that education regimes which measure success through standardized tests that demand performances of rote memory are unlikely to produce teachers who prepare their students for performances of 21^st century skill demonstration.

As a result of these disincentives, teachers who want to wisely incorporate technology into their instruction are something of a rarity, and they tend to appear in wealthy, suburban schools where the teachers and administrators face little threat of having any significant number of their students fail to pass state tests. As a result, students who already attend schools with a variety of resource advantages, enjoy the additional instructional advantages of using Web 20 tools to develop fundamental skills and rehearse for 21^st century environments, while their less well-off peers enjoy fewer opportunities in schools with fewer resources. Even extraordinary efforts to put more computers and bigger network connections in urban schools will provide little amelioration to the inequity because the appearance of machines is not going to change the incentive structure which rewards teachers who use computers for drilling students on basic math problems but not for involving them in collaborative, public performances of their understanding. In the most likely scenario unfolding in the United States, and perhaps in other Western countries, free Web 2.0 tools are likely to exacerbate the opportunity/achievement gap, since only schools with the luxury to largely ignore testing requirements will be able to afford the time to experiment with these new tools.

Changing this future scenario would require making some significant changes in the entire educational system. The most likely alternative scenario is one where business leaders demand that the educational system shifts its focus to 21^st century skills, as groups like the Partnership for 21^st Century Skills are trying to do in America. The growing gap between the applications of Web 2.0 tools in the world and in schools may be a critical part of the argument for more 21^st century instruction. Based on that call, national standards and laws would change to reward schools for trying to go beyond the basic skills to teach critical thinking and complex communication, or perhaps teach the basics in the context of these new, critical skills. From there, schools and teachers would have to conduct a campaign of education technology professional development for teachers that used a proportion of resources similar to those invested in getting computers in schools in the first place. Schools of education would need to do more to prepare pre-service teachers for using technology, which would of course require many of the professors in schools of education to learn something about how to go about doing so. These technology reform efforts, however, would need to be driven by a desire to reshape the goals of education, rather than the desire to simply integrate technology. Technology can abet school reform, but it cannot replace it.

There are several other factors which may nudge the future towards or away from greater educational adoption of Web 2.0 tools. As more young teachers, digital natives, enter the teaching service with their technological experience, they may find it easier to adopt new technologies. That said, it is unclear that there is a strong relationship between technological know-how and the use of technology in the classroom. Most teachers learn to teach from their own experience and from mentors, neither of which usually provide an exemplary model for technology use in the classroom.

Certain technological advances could give a nudge towards using more technologies. If the cost of computers drops dramatically, such that 1-1 computing models in schools become broadly feasible, that may allow for greater adoption of a wide variety of computing technologies. It would also help if school adopted software that gave teachers better control over computers, such that teachers could restrict and allow access to certain applications, websites etc. in real time during a class period. Those kinds of structures would make it easier for students to stay on task and easier for teachers to structure and scaffold learning. Internet filters are currently a serious obstacle towards using websites in the classroom. Most filters are knee-high fences around the internet which tech-savvy children jump over easily and which older teachers trip over. In many schools, filters serve to keep teachers off of the internet and away from employing novel teaching strategies while students happily employ proxy servers and other tricks to evade filters. Depending on these technological advances and policy decisions, we may see greater or lesser adoption of Web 2.0 tools in classrooms.

From the perspective of the university, the last thing that might be done to encourage a future where 21^st century skills are taught through practices involving Web 2.0 would be to provide research to the education policy community that can show the benefits of learning 21^st century skills in collaborative online environments and the inequitable distribution of these opportunities.

Gauging the future of the web

The collected works of Shakespeare include three categories of plays. In the comedies, things get better, and in the tragedies things get worse. It is in the histories that we find stories where some people are winners and others are not, and these histories probably provide the best models for predicting the future.

The driving technical principle behind the evolution of Web 2.0 tools is the reduction of the interaction costs of communication, and these costs will continue to be driven down. As these costs are driven down, we will continue to see the emergence of qualitatively new behaviors and the products of these behaviors will be as or more bizarre to future peoples as Wikipedia and Twitter are to us now. These new behaviors will be at some level democratizing, as they will involve harnessing collaborative energy and collective intelligence to meet cooperative goals. Many of these innovations will level hierarchies and include and involve more people in social systems. They will accelerate globalization by making cross-cultural, cross-content, cross-time-zone conversations even cheaper and take less time to achieve.

In some cases, business will use these tools to manipulate people into buying all manner of worthless products, and in other cases business will use these tools to allow consumers to participate in the design of new products that more effectively satisfy human needs. Global warming activists will use the tools to rally massive numbers of people to work to attend to this major crisis, and hate groups will use the tools to rally people together to oppress others. Some schools may use these tools to nurture new skill sets in their students, which may be essential and beneficial to national competitiveness, but create greater inequities between those who have, and those who lack, these 21^st century skills. Other schools will use new media to continue herding students through an outdated, industrialized mode of education. Individuals may develop wider networks of online friends and fewer close ties, and those without reliable internet access may be locked out of the social networks of prestige and power. Web 2.0 tools will erase some of the challenges of collaborating and communicating across time and geography, and they will enact a series of new challenges in the stead of the old.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

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The 2000 Lisbon strategy is a European goal which has essential implications for the educational and training systems of the member states; a set of specific objectives (European Commission, 2001) which among others involve the content of education according to a lifelong learning perspective for the construction of the so-called Knowledge-based economy has been adopted throughout Europe. Nevertheless, it seems that there have been ’shortcomings and obvious delays’ in implementing the Lisbon strategy. Within this frame, the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) has been initiated to promote good practice and achieve greater convergence towards the main EU goals through the use and development of indicators and benchmarks. The indicators and benchmarks have a dual role; they reveal disparities in performance levels between or within states and stimulate exchange of expertise and policy approaches, and they are also used as instruments for the monitoring of progress towards common objectives where these have been adopted (European Commission, 2005a). The second role denotes a qualitative function which is also apparent in the second and third points of the OMC outline.

In conclusion, we could say that the EU has intensified the convergence effort which does not seem to become real within the following two years; the first point of the OMC outline which ’sets targets in the long term’ (see footnote 4, point 1) and the OMC itself imply that the Lisbon strategy will remain a pending target beyond the ‘benchmark’ year 2010.

The CRELL-Network (Centre for Research on Lifelong Learning), which has been established in the vein of the OMC, is an institute conducting research on the basis of indicators and benchmarks according to the Lisbon strategy targets, on economics, econometrics, education, social sciences and statistics in an interdisciplinary approach to research. So far, there are 5 benchmarks and 29 indicators within 8 broad domains for the monitoring of progress towards the common objectives. One of the CRELL-Network projects is ‘Active Citizenship in a Learning Context’ which addresses the question of ‘what are the individual learning outcomes (civic competence) in terms of knowledge, attitudes and skills required to generate an active citizen, and how can this competence be measured using composite indicators based on existing data’. In the frame of this project, the Civic Competence Composite Indicator (CCCI) (Hoskins et al, 2008) has been developed following the Active Citizenship Composite Indicator (ACCI) (Hoskins et al, 2006). According to Hoskins et al (2008, p13) ‘civic competence is understood as the ability required for enabling individuals to become active citizens’ while active citizenship is defined as ‘participation in civil society, community and/or political life, characterized by mutual respect and non violence and in accordance with human rights and democracy’ (Hoskins, 2006). Education and training for an active citizenship pertain to ‘learning opportunities (formal, non-formal and informal) that occur at any stage of the life cycle that facilitate or encourage active citizenship’ (ibid.).

From the discussion above, there are two points that merit focus; the content of the ACCI and CCCI, that is, the qualitative traits of active citizenship and civic competence and also the theoretical background of the whole project, trying to foresee any future implications for the development of citizenship identity from the perspective of the EU.

Departing from the main question of the project ‘how a concept such as active citizenship can be measured’ (Hoskins et al, 2006, p6) many might claim that the specific question seems rather problematic as it raises ontological questions regarding the essence of a ‘concept’ and its susceptibility to measurement. Nevertheless, the specific research question gives an exploratory and experimental connotation to the project in terms of rendering a concept into a measurable object which is the core objective of the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) and the CRELL-Network and thus it should be perceived as such.

‘Participation in civil society, community and/or political life, characterized by mutual respect and non violence and in accordance with human rights and democracy.’ (Hoskins, 2006)

Active citizenship understood as ‘participation‘ encompasses Putnam’s (2000) concept of ‘civic engagement’ and the theory of social capital (Hoskins et al, 2006), both purported to raise shared values and objectives leading to social cohesion and economic success.

Although the authors state that active citizenship ‘has evolved as a specific strand within research on social capital’ (ibid.) they nevertheless do not make clear whether ‘active citizenship’ is a decree or a finding of the so-called social capital research, verified in practice or a hypothesis made in the frame of social capital theory aiming at some kind of ‘citizenship’ modality. The definition of active citizenship presented as a CRELL ‘production’ (ibid. p10) implies the second case as active citizenship definitions vary and thus the specific definition is one among many. Following the specific rationale we could say that the Active Citizenship Composite Indicator is a measuring tool for a specific ‘kind’ of active citizenship with finite traits.

The following sentence could be considered as the quintessence of the CRELL perception of active citizenship. More specifically ‘Active citizenship is an essential element of the (Lisbon) Strategy, putting the spotlight on values, representative democracy and civil society.’ (Hoskins et al, 2006:6)

The sentence above, apart from the fact that it presents the actual basis of the specific definition development, that is to say the Lisbon Strategy, also implies a theoretical affinity between the Lisbon strategy and the social capital theory and research. Active citizenship is ‘participation’ in the political life, civil society, community life and the values needed for active citizenship (recognition of the importance of human rights, democracy and understanding) (p11). These ‘dimensions of active citizenship’ comprise the measurable and distinctive elements for the composite indicator development. In the indicators lists (see Appendix 1) one may see that the frame of active citizenship involves specific sites (ie political parties for the political life, HR-TU organisations for the civil life, religious, business, sports, cultural, social and teacher organisations for community life) and is viewed in terms of membership, participation, money donation, voluntary work and voting.

For instance, in the political life dimension and the National Parliament in particular, active citizenship does not include ’standing for elections’ which is an entrenched right even in the conventional representative democracy, and is limited in ‘voting turnout’. Similarly, in terms of political parties, initiative-taking for the creation of political configurations is not mentioned; on the contrary active citizenship in this domain concerns membership, participation, money donation and voluntary work.

Moreover, in the civil society dimension referring to political non-governmental action, active citizenship similarly involves membership, participation, money donation and voluntary work in organisations while protesting is about working in an organisation/association, petition signing, taking part in lawful demonstrations, boycotting products, ethical consumption and contacting a politician. The community dimension is distinguished from the civil society dimension as the activities involved ‘are more oriented towards community support mechanisms and less towards political action and accountability of governments’ (Hoskins et al, 2006, p13). From the statement above, we can assume that community is perceived as an independent locus while participation, say, in a bowling club is considered to be a dimension of active citizenship.

The values dimension concerns a combination of indicators on democracy and human rights, thus a specific definition for democracy is implied including the importance of voting, obeying laws, independent opinion development, voluntary and political action. Moreover, as far as human rights and intercultural understanding are concerned, they mostly involve immigrants (ie immigrants should have the same rights; immigrants make the country worse/better). More specifically, in the first indicator cited above, a fallacy occurs regarding human rights and citizenship rights identifying the first with the latter. The vexed question is whether the ’same rights’ refer to human rights as it is initially stated (Appendix 1, Table 4) or to the rights attached to citizenship as a legal institution. It seems that the second case is most probable as the use of the adjective ’same’ implies a comparative dimension (ie ‘as us/you’) and at the same time it entails a sense of completeness of rights for ‘us/you’. Moreover, any reference to human rights is exhausted on issues of racial discrimination and racism.

In general, we could say that the indicators delineate an activity confined in mere participation where initiative taking is excluded. Hence, active citizenship is restricted in a pre-established set of loci within which ‘participation’ and not initiative taking is the status quo option. Moreover, democracy is represented as equalling loyalism while there is a vagueness concerning the content of (human) rights which only concern immigrants and not all.

What active citizenship is not involves limits set by ‘ethical boundaries’ excluding extremist groups that promote intolerance and violence against the principles of human rights and the rule of law (p11). In addition to the previous paragraph we could conclude that ‘extremism’ could be considered any action moving beyond the aforementioned active citizenship frame.

The concept of ‘key competences’ is prevalent in the Lisbon Strategy as the basic infrastructure for effective engagement in the lifelong learning process and it is linked with the ‘fundamental change in the way which education and knowledge are understood in the context of globalisation and a rapidly changing work environment’ where emphasis is placed upon the ‘output and individual competences‘ rather than input and the process of knowledge transfer from one generation to the next (Hoskins et al, 2008, p15). Civic competence is considered to be one of the key competences linked with active citizenship and comprises one of the eight competences leading to economic success. According to Hoskins et al (p19) civic competence covers both affective and cognitive dimensions and highlights the factors that will facilitate a broad dimension of life including multiculturalism and labour market participation. The CCCI represents the ‘civic competence’ measuring tool for a specific age population (14 years old) and it refers to the learning inputs and learning outcomes that are needed to facilitate active citizenship. The theoretical model upon which the CCCI was constructed ‘is an attempt to create an operational measurement of civic competence and constitutes a hypothesis on the measurement of civic competence, it does not intend to describe how civic competence function in practice’ (p.38). Nevertheless, the theoretical framework of the CRELL (civic) competence concept is highly based on relevant work on behalf of the OECD (Rychen and Salganic, 2003; DeSeCo, 2005; Mainguet and Baye, 2006), UNESCO (Rychen and Tiana, 2004), the European Commission (1998) and the Council of Europe (Veldhuis, 1997; Audigier, 2000) drawing from the human and social capital theory and Putnam (2000) in particular.

As mentioned earlier, the CCCI consists of a set of indicators which refer to the following two broad areas; the affective dimension (values, attitudes and intended behaviour) and the cognitive dimension (knowledge and skills). Commenting upon the indicators content (see Appendix 2) defining the output facilitating active citizenship, we could make a general remark; input is similarly related to knowledge, skills, attitudes and values for the preservation of the current order of things and the encouragement of participation in pre-established sites opposed to initiative taking and the further development of institutions and democracy.

More specifically, in the values indicators we can see that ‘acceptance’ is required only for the rule of law, while ‘a belief’ is required for social justice, importance of democracy, the preservation of the environment. This is an oxymoron since laws do not always protect but on the contrary, impinge upon social justice, democracy and the preservation of environment. Moreover, in the same list we have ‘respect for human rights (equality, dignity and freedom)’ and ‘a belief in social justice and the equality and equal treatment of citizens’. Comparing the two values exhibiting similarities, we can see that the second one which refers to ‘citizens’ has a more commanding tone to the first one which refers to human rights in general; we could thus presume that the case of discrimination between citizens and non-citizens (immigrants) is rather possible.

Moreover, in the intended behaviour indicators we have ‘intention to participate in the political community’, ‘intention to be active in the community’, ‘intention to participate in civil society’. Moreover, in the knowledge indicators, and the ‘key elements of the political and legal system’ we have ‘the importance of voting’ solely, while ’standing for elections’ is not mentioned. Similarly, in the Skills indicators we have ‘to be able to monitor and influence policies and decisions including through voting’. In the indicators above engagement is represented as participation either in community, civil society or voting.

Additionally, in the attitudes indicators, we have ‘to trust in and have loyalty toward democratic principles and institutions’. The use of trust in the CCCI framework is quite vague since according to Hoskins et al (2008, p32) ‘it is not clear if it is preferable to trust the political institutions all of the time or never’.

On the other hand, protest activities (PROTE) are excluded ‘from the overall index of civic competence since it might identify support for extremist actions, such as spraying graffiti or blocking the roads’ (p33) similarly to ‘political rights for anti-democratic groups’ (ADGR) on the grounds that such indicators could pick up a distinction between liberal and communitarian democracy ‘rather than accepting both forms of democracy as equally valid’ (ibid.). Moreover, the ‘positive attitude towards immigrants’ (IMMIG) is also excluded because the questions ‘cannot be related to a normative criterion for civic competence; they relate more to political left or right position on immigration and as such can be highly sensitive’ (Hoskins et al, 2008, p33).

From the indicators above, it seems that civic competence is considered to function within the sphere of the established order and is purported to be neutral without any ideological inclinations. As far as the role of the CCCI is concerned, the extraction of specific indicators of the original database which might either ‘identify support’ or ‘pick up distinction’ does not seem to operate in terms of measurement of civic competence as initially stated; on the contrary it does have a descriptive disposition regarding the content and practical dimension of civic competence.

According to Hoskins et al (2008, p25) ‘the new context of political realities faced in today’s world with increased globalisation and in light of awareness of global terrorism’ constitute additional parameters to the civic competence concept. They are included in the future International Citizenship and Civic Education Study (2009) which seems to provide an updated database for the CRELL-Network. Moreover, although the use of ICT is considered to be a new form of (civic) participation (Hoskins et al. 2008, p11) it does not comprise part of the Civic Competence Composite Indicator framework as it is covered in other key competence indicators of the EU (p73). Nevertheless, in Hoskins and Mascherini (2008) this interest is highlighted as ICT use is linked with the civil society and NGOs regarding the development of informal networks implying an additional factor for civic competence development which remains unexplored.

According to Hoskins and Mascherini (2008) Marshall’s (1950) view for citizenship is quite limited and focused upon the rights and responsibilities of the individual in relation to the state and contemporary research on citizenship focuses upon the citizens’ participation in political processes with the ‘intent to influence’ (Verba and Nie, 1972) and to be involved in the decision making and deliberative democracy for policy development (Mutz, 2006). Moreover, active citizenship is thought to have important links with education including both formal and non-formal education (Holford and van der Veen, 2003) and vocational education and training (Preston and Green, 2003). Within this context, the European mandates of developing a competitive ‘knowledge society’ and greater ’social cohesion’ have highlighted active citizenship as a rather promising concept for the fulfilment of the aforementioned aims and as a means of ‘empowering citizens to have their voice heard within their communities, a sense of belonging and a stake in the society in which they live, the value of democracy, equality and understanding different cultures and different opinions (European Commission, 1998). According to Hoskins and Mascherini (2008) the key concepts attached to the E.U. perception of active citizenship involve Social Capital drawing mostly from Putnam (1993, 2000) and the role of networking and ‘civil community’ and Social Cohesion which refers to a broad range of dimensions of society including employment, housing, health and well being, collaboration, and marginalisation of social groups. More specifically

‘Social cohesion is society’s ability to secure the long-term well-being of all its members, including equitable access to available resources, respect for human dignity with due regard for diversity, personal and collective autonomy and responsible participation.’ Council of Europe, 2005)

Commenting upon the CRELL theoretical framework, we could say that the social capital theory, along with the ‘civil community’ or ‘civil society’ concept , has concerns for many neo-liberal practices disguised into community theories. From the perspective of political economy, the resurgence of interest in community stems from Neo-liberalism entailing ‘re-articulation of the roles and goals of the state; a withdrawal from social service provision mixed with reassertion of the state’s roles in repression and social control and a concomitant reconstruction of the non-profit ‘third’ sector’ (Gilmore, 1998; Lake and Newman, 2002) within which ‘community’ plays a central role. According to DeFilippis, Fisher and Shragge (2006: 676) the supposition of the ’social capital’ concept is that ‘the set of resources that inhere in relationships of trust and cooperation between people… may be the most promising starting point for new directions in combating poverty. Additionally to this, this perception situates the local community as the site and solution to social problems skirting the role of capitalism and the state (ibid.). Simply put, the effort for social change is purported to occur without challenging both the economic and political status quo. According to Parazelli and Tardif (1998) the community sector becomes linked to the technocratic apparatus of the state and as a consequence, social problems become fragmented and local organisations subcontractors of the state. Another kind of critique refers to the ‘cultural’ side of community as promoting conformity and homogeneity and excluding the ‘non members’ of the community (Young, 1990: 235). DeFilippis, Fisher and Shragge (2006: 681) argue that such critiques can bring us dangerously close to political disempowerment by de-legitimising collective action. Nevertheless, it seems that collective action is qualitatively different to community action.

To recap, critique about communitarian theories basically refers to two points; the first is the erroneous decontextualisation of community as an independent site of economic-social-political action pertaining to structural fragmentation of society and is viewed as a transformation of capitalism so as to transcend its crises. The second point is about ‘cultural/ideological’ fragmentation between the members and outsiders of the community who have not espoused the values and aims of the community.

For instance, in terms of the EU perception of active citizenship the community dimension is represented as an independent locus (see section 2.1.2). Moreover, in terms of the ‘cultural/ideological’ fragmentation refusal of the rule of law, belief in direct democracy and involvement in the law making process could be considered as deviation from community’s basic values and ‘ethical boundaries’.

With reference to this last point above concerning ‘community’, the concept of identity is rather useful for the specific conversation. According to Haste (2004) identity is about

“group membership and self-definition in terms of social categories, including nationhood, community, sense of place, and ethnic and religious identity, where these are salient. It defines who shall be deemed ingroup and outgroup, and therefore, what shall be the basis for sharing symbols and metaphors with others. It also includes self-identity, in which adherence to particular values or beliefs becomes part of the self: “I am the kind of person who believes such and such.”

Additionally, a conceptual overlapping occurs between citizenship and identity as the construction of the citizen is in part the construction of an identity (Antaki and Widdicombe, 1998). From the EU perspective, the construction of active citizenship identity is not related to nationhood, ethnic and religious identity. Nevertheless, it does refer to community, sense of place, in-grouping and symbols/metaphors sharing. The Lisbon Strategy holds a prominent position within the EU discourse and is represented as a shared objective or even a binding obligation among the European member-states and their people, not only politicians. Hence, the Lisbon strategy seems to play the role of a European ideal, a metaphor implying future prosperity for all Europeans.

Furthermore, the specific citizenship identity seems to involve in-groups and out-groups. On a first analysis, this distinction could refer to citizens and immigrants. As we saw earlier, the lack of human rights is linked exclusively with immigrants and is limited to racism and discrimination (see 2.1.2). One might claim that ‘immigrants’ fulfil the positioning (Haste, 2004) towards the ‘other’ affirming the European citizenship identity. Nevertheless, it could be equally argued that the ‘others’ are those who do not espouse the values of the European community as described above.

Moreover, the measurement of either active citizenship or civic competence is about European countries solely and thus a spatial dimension is added in the citizenship identity.

Finally, apart from the fact that the CRELL-Network per se has been created for the facilitation of the Lisbon strategy fulfilment, the conducted secondary research on active citizenship is based on a specific theoretical framework regarding specific values and objectives in accordance with the strategy. As we saw in the case of the CCCI, some indicators have been extracted such as IMMIG and ADGR on the grounds of ideological neutrality for left or right wing positioning for immigration, and liberal and communitarian positioning regarding political rights of anti-democratic groups. From the above, it seems that the CRELL-Network forges a specific citizenship identity participating in meaning making and negotiation of the concept attributing qualitative traits to citizenship.

The EU perception of active citizenship attached to the Lisbon strategy implies a morally-charged agenda which involves competitiveness and economic success on the one hand and social cohesion on the other. It could be argued that the deeper meaning of the specific objectives involves an equilibrium effort between the personal and collective spheres of life, which translated into political theory terms is a merging attempt of liberal and communitarian stances. As cited earlier, for Hoskins et al (2008) both forms of democracy are equally valid and this perception might indeed reveal that the dispute between communitarians and liberals devoid of the economy dimension is a superficial contention and part of a specific narrative limited within pseudo-dilemmas without challenging the actual political and economic status quo. Westheimer and Kahne (2004) give us a really useful distinction between three kinds of ‘good’ citizenship; the personally responsible citizen, the participatory citizen and the justice-oriented citizen. On their argumentation about the three views of active citizenship they state that character or volunteering oriented programmes belonging to the first and second view of ‘good’ citizenship respectively, embrace a vision of citizenship either devoid of politics or inadequate for the deeper examination of the workings and processes of politics and society. They then assert that justice-oriented citizenship addressing a macro-level critique of society can ideally enhance critical analysis of root causes of injustice with opportunities to develop capacities for participation. Subjecting the EU perception for active citizenship to the distinction above we could say that the social capital concept viewed as enhancing levels of trust and cooperation along with the objective of participation matches the two first categories referring to character development and volunteerism. Social cohesion which refers to the social sphere of life is not about social justice. In addition to this, the ‘acceptance’ of the rule of law does not seem to encourage the critical assessment of social, political and economic structures and practices leading to identification of the root causes of problems as Westheimer and Kahne (2004) suggest . Similarly, the concept of ‘extremism’ (ie extremist protest activities) within the specific discourse sets limits and frames of ‘illegitimacy’ for actions and perhaps aims. Moreover, the ‘human rights’ reduced to issues of discrimination and racism and identified with citizenship rights obscure the institutional character of (citizenship) rights materialised as practices and access to resources, a highly economical issue.

Hence it seems that the EU perception of citizenship is about a citizenship modality which does not aim at radical social changes but it intends to perpetuate the current order of things without staking the political and economic status quo. Hence, this moulded citizenship culture promotes a somewhat superficial or depoliticised thinking which fails to evolve into dialectical, critical and creative thinking enabling learners to rationalise the root causes of problems, imagine an alternative and just society and work toward this direction. Nevertheless, youth generation needs to be perceived as a generation that make history (Flacks, 1988; Toren, 1993), which entails making sense of the world around them and working toward a meaningful future drawing from useful information and ideological inspiration (Youniss and Yates, 1999).

The specific citizenship modality as analysed and presented in the preceding discussion needs to be viewed in relation to the Lisbon strategy and policy suggestions enabling us to foresee any future educational implications. Moreover, the OECD work on ‘active citizenship’ could also give us useful insights about the future EU citizenship education agenda as, according to the review conducted, the CRELL-Network follows the specific organisation on both a theoretical (see 2.2) and research level as the use of indicators has been initiated by the OECD in the frame of the INES project since 1988.

The interest exhibited on behalf of the CRELL-Network for the use of ICT and civil society/NGO’s concerns the development of informal networks implying an additional factor for civic competence. Although in the CCCI research report (Hoskins et al, 2008, p73) ICT is stated to be the object of another key competence indicator of the EU, in Hoskins and Mascherini (2008) there is an interest anew in the specific area denoting the emergence of an essential variable for the future of citizenship both as a concept and as an educational practice. There are two points that merit our focus; the EU educational policy and future objectives, and also the new possibilities arising for the initiation of e-citizenship.

As far as the first point is concerned, in the Concrete Future Objectives (European Commission, 2001:8) there is a clear emphasis on the perspective of lifelong learning and the development of the knowledge-based economy within which ICT has a dual role; ‘it requires us to keep the definition of basic skills under review and to adapt to it those changes on a regular basis’. Hence, it seems that ICT is both a variable of conceptual development of skills and a tool for the skills application. In general we could say that in the European Union discourse ICT is represented as a sine qua non of the fulfilment of the Lisbon strategy.

Therefore, ICT mastery could be perceived as an element of the European citizenship identity, giving the identity definition an additional and perhaps unprecedented component. So, following Haste (2004), we could say that the self-identity viewed from the perspective of the EU also includes the mastery of specific skills named as competences, which schematically could be described as follows: “I am the kind of person who can do such and such”.

In Building the Knowledge Society: Social and Human Capital Interactions (European Commission, 2003, p40) ICT is considered to be important in people’s ability to make use of it to engage in meaningful social practices. Moreover, the internet is regarded to have created a space for civil society escaping all conventional jurisdictions, being incipiently de-nationalised and offering the possibility for interested citizens to act in concert across the globe while it provides new opportunities for governments to interact with individual citizens without the mediation of elected representatives or civil society organisations (pp43-44). It seems that ICT and internet are viewed as the medium and arena of social action respectively enabling active citizenship to exert influence even in the political domain by ie contacting a member of the government.

Participation in Informal e-networks could be seen as the following locus for active citizenship while civic e-communication could be considered as the future additional parameter of civic competence generating a category of sub-skills updating with this way the skills definition within the new challenge of civic participation in the public space of internet. The ‘third sector’ and civil society, materialised as NGOs exhibit an increase in their importance in the last decades (Santiso, 2000), and thus NGOs could play an important role in citizenship education as educational agents integrated into formal education. This scenario is highly possible as the emergent new category of sub-skills attached to this dimension of active citizenship should be a priori developed within formal education. Moreover, the technology of information and communication gives the opportunity for interaction between the two sectors. This means that we could have the amalgamation of formal and non-formal learning opportunities where the first can become modulated so as to contribute positively to the new locus of citizenship. Consequently, if formal education provides knowledge regarding the political institutions for future participation in the political domain, it should similarly prepare them for participation in the new locus of citizenship action, expanding with this way learners’ civic competence.

E-citizenship could become a very popular educational aim all over Europe in the following twenty years as it combines important elements of the European citizenship identity; active citizenship, ICT use, networking engagement. Moreover it contributes to the ‘deterritorialisation of (European) space’ (Delanty, 2000: 81, brackets added) facilitating the apperception of the European Union as a substantial organization legitimized in the consciousness of e-citizens.

The interaction between the two sectors of formal education and NGOs for the cultivation of e-citizenship could provide new learning experiences. Following Benett’s (2008: 21) question ‘what kind of democratic experiences would we choose for future generations’, the answer is simple but complicated at the same time; it depends on the kind of democracy we want to cultivate to them, a highly political issue. Without any doubt, the ‘European’ perception of e-citizenship could not escape the theoretical framework of active citizenship seen as mere participation aiming at the preservation of the political and economic status quo. Similarly, e-communication could be based on the dissemination of a relevant shared discourse consisting of meanings, values and aims non-threatening to the system.

Coleman (2008, p191), making a distinction between autonomous and managed e-citizenship, argues that ‘managed e-citizenship starts from the assumption that the internet as an anarchic realm in which unknown nodes perpetually collide, is an unsafe place for young people, not only because their social innocence might be exploited by predators but also because they are politically vulnerable to misinformation and misdirection’ (italics added). In the same vein, Luke (2002) raises concerns regarding the ‘hidden pedagogies of citizenship’; technological infrastructures could mould citizenship into a narrow, quiescent and consumerist model of civic action. A very illustrative example is the OECD e-Democracy project; OECD E-engagement pertains to the following three objectives:

1) Information: a one-way relation in which government produces and delivers information for use by citizens. It covers both ‘passive’ access to information upon demand by citizens and ‘active’ measures by governments to disseminate information to citizens.

2) Consultation: a two-way relation in which citizens provide feedback to government. It is based on the prior definition by government of the issue on which citizens’ views are being sought and requires the provision of information.

3) Active participation: a relation based on partnership with government, in which citizens actively engage in the policy-making process. It acknowledges a role for citizens in proposing policy options and shaping the policy-dialogue although the responsibility for the final decision or policy formulation rests with government.

(OECD, 2003: 32, italics and bolds added)

In the objectives above, we can see a specific view for e-democracy exclusively operated by the government in terms of information dissemination and decision making. The specific framework excludes all the other agents of the political system such as the parties of the opposition, organisations of citizens or non citizens, trade unions, individuals etc. Consequently, the information upon which the so-called policy dialogue is built upon could be of doubtful quality as there is no provision for accountability and verification. As a result, the policy dialogue is contingent upon the information given by the government and ‘active citizenship’ is confined within the specific set of information and its concomitant options for voting. It could thus be argued that the specific e-democracy could be better characterised as ‘e-oligarchy’ since pluralism and the participation of other political agents are excluded.

The OECD report also raises some issues concerning the effective engagement of people in e-democracy. Among others, the design of a technology supportive of active participation providing the means for the facilitation of the pursuit of networks is suggested while the active citizenship capacity refers to the development of deliberation skills entailing listening to, and engaging in, argument and counter arguments (2008: 20-21).

We could conclude that e-democracy according to the OECD pertains to the development of a specific software supporting the development of networking and virtual communities participating in fora organised by the government who is the exclusive provider of information regarding the political agenda. The deliberation process could thus be organised in a specific framework and arguments/counter arguments could be based on the specific set of information probably yielding to specific voting options.

According to the example above, it seems that the so-called involvement of citizens in the law making process is a fictive one while it creates the illusion of grass-roots democracy. The possibility of information assessment, political speech articulation and formation of alternative suggestions for voting is excluded and thus a consumerist model of citizenship of ready-made propositions is the case indeed.

5. Epilogue

From the preceding analysis we could say that a citizenship modality is aimed on behalf of the EU aspired to safeguard the dissemination of Neo-liberalism through the theorem of active citizenship. The secondary research conducted by the CRELL-Network has produced two measuring tools for active citizenship and civic competence according to the OMC (Open Method of Coordination) for the creation of indicators and benchmarks. The theoretical framework which draws from the social capital theory and the use of primary data showed that the aim is not solely the quantitative description of active citizenship and civic competence but also their conceptual crafting. As claimed earlier, the use of ICT in active citizenship seems to be a very important future tool for the development of citizenship e-networks. The construction of a virtual civil society entails the cultivation of civic e-communication for the engagement in managed e-space, networks participation, e-deliberation and e-voting. Such perspectives could create the development of relevant educational software for primary education students or actual participation in e-spaces for the students of the following educational levels. Although the CRELL-Network has not dealt yet with this issue, it can be asserted that it could be included in the future agenda for active citizenship as it combines important elements of the European citizenship identity; active citizenship, ICT use, networking engagement. However, both e-citizenship and the construction of the virtual civil society must not be viewed outside the social, economic, and political milieu within which ‘active citizenship’ and the actual civil society have been identified. Simply put, e-democracy does not necessarily imply direct democracy but, on the contrary, it can operate as sham democracy giving the impression of equal participation in decision making like ‘active citizenship’.

As stated earlier, citizenship learning is always in accordance with the kind of democracy we want to cultivate in learners, either we are aware of that or not. Having always in mind the two basic principles of democracy we should try to encourage learners to question their own identity within democracy making the following questions: ‘What is my position within the polity, who am I within democracy? Who should I be?’ in order to be able to critique the quality of democracy they experience (in terms of institutions, practices and rights) and pursue the kind of democracy they want. Hence, instead of active citizenship equalling mere participation in pre-established sites we should better suggest the term radical citizenship equalling initiative taking and attached to alternative concepts such as social justice instead of social cohesion, society instead of community and deciding that instead of ‘influencing’ decision making enabling them to develop a different citizenship identity, and realise that the effort for social change cannot occur without challenging both the economic and political status quo.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation. References

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1. fixing guidelines for the Union combined with specific timetables for achieving the goals which they set, in the short, medium and long term;

2. establishing, where appropriate, quantitative and qualitative indicators and benchmarks against the best in the world and tailored to the needs of different Member States and sectors as a means of comparing best practice;

3. translating these European guidelines into national and regional policies by setting specific targets and adopting measures, taking into account national and regional differences;

4. periodic monitoring, evaluation and peer review, organised as mutual learning processes (Bolds added, European Commission, 2005: 22)

Early school leavers, Key competencies, Completion of upper-secondary education, Mathematics, science and technology graduates and Lifelong learning http://crell.jrc.ec.europa.eu/list_indicators.htm (accessed on 26/09)

Improving the quality of teachers and trainers, Developing skills for the Knowledge Society, Increasing recruitment to mathematics, science and technology, Making best use of resources, Open Learning Environment, Making Learning more Attractive, Improving foreign language learning, Mobility and Co-operation

http://crell.jrc.ec.europa.eu/list_indicators.htm (accessed on 26/09)

The indicators used for the construction of the CCCI involve data from the IEA 1999 CivEd survey covering 22 European countries and focusing upon the 14 years old. The main aim of the survey was to understand ‘how young people are prepared to undertake their role as citizens’.

The 63 indicators used for the construction of the ACCI involve data from the European Social Survey (2002) covering 19 European Countries.

Putnam (2000) states that ‘active citizenship’ is strongly related to ‘civic engagement’ and that it plays a crucial role in building social capital

The definition used in this paper is the following: ‘the institutions, relationships, attitudes and values that govern interactions among people and contribute to the economic and social development’ (Grootaert and Van Bastelaer, 2001)

The acronyms stand for Human Rights and Trade Unions organisations

According to Hoskins et al (2006: 12) ‘Political life refers to the sphere of the state and conventional representative democracy such as participation in voting, representation of women in the national parliament and regular party work’

According to Hoskins (2006) ‘civil society refers to the political non governmental action.’ It refers to the ‘arena of un-coerced collective action around shared interests, purposes and values’.

See European Commission (2005)

Competence is conceived as a holistic concept encompassing cognitive skills, attitudes and non-cognitive components such as values (Rychen, 2004: 21-22) which are referred as the affective dimension of competence.

Learning inputs are considered to be learning opportunities (formal, non-formal and informal) that occur at any stage of the life cycles that facilitate or encourage active citizenship (Hoskins 2006b).

The association between learning and active citizenship in the report, is attributed to Putnam (2000) who states that overall levels of education have been associated with higher levels of civic participation.

In Hoskins and Mascherini (2008) protest activities are stated to have been included in terms of lawful demonstrations, signing a petition, boycotting products, and deliberately buying certain products for political, ethical and environmental reasons (ethical consumption).

There are two terms describing the specific theories; ‘neocommunitarianism’ (Jessop, 2002) and ‘Neo-liberal communitarianism’ (DeFilippis, 2004)

See Bottani (1996)

‘Networks can be seen as formal and informal organisations that facilitate the exchange of information and technology and foster various kinds of co-ordination and collaboration in the economic arena’ (European Commission 2003: 30).

E-citizenship has been welcomed by the British government; ‘ICT provides a means by which public participation can be increased, and we hope that with an active government policy the potential benefits can be maximised’ ( HM Government, 2002)

The OECD research report (2003) Promise and Problems of E-Democracy: Challenges of on-line citizen engagement considers if, how and what information and communication technologies (ICT) can achieve extend enhanced citizen engagement in the policy-making process. The research was based on collaborative research projects in 12 OECD member states (Australia, Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Slovak Republic, Sweden and U.K.) and the European Commission. The project was based on an earlier OECD report Citizens as Partners (2001) setting the conceptual platform and the objectives of e-democracy. According to the 2001 report, ‘democratic political participation must involve the means to be informed, the mechanisms to take part in the decision-making and the ability to contribute and influence the political agenda’ (OECD, 2003: 32).

In OECD (2008)

There are two fundamental principles of democracy; the principle of individual autonomy (no one should be subjected to rules that have been imposed by others) and the principle of equality (everyone should have the same opportunity for participation in the formation of the rules).

Radical citizenship refers to radical democracy, a concept attributed to Laclau and Mouffe (1985) challenging liberal and Neo liberal concepts of democracy.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

To state that predicting future social trends is a complex business would be to stretch the acceptable bounds of understatement. Predicting the future of citizenship is all the more formidable. However, we should not shrink from such prophetic tasks as it encourages us to confront and, more importantly, consider the concept in all its glorious complexity. Undoubtedly, in recent decades technological advances, particularly the emergence of new forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC) has had a tremendous impact on the ways that we live our lives. However, in contrast to the many dizzying changes occurring, certain things, like ourselves, appear to be fundamental and permanent.

This paper examines the future of citizenship within local communities from the perspective of place. The first section proceeds by outlining the important relationship between place and identity and weighs up the existence of a positive relationship between place-identity and local civic engagement. This is followed by considering the impacts of technological development for identity. It is suggested that place will remain fundamental to the construction of identity and community. Nonetheless, CMC is changing the way we think about place and identity relationships, with reference to the emerging importance of virtual spaces and authentication of selfhood. Moreover, physical and virtual aspects of identity and place have already begun to merge.

The paper then moves on to discuss the future of local communities. It is argued that CMC will complement and enhance offline interaction rather than diminish it. A number of studies are discussed that highlight the advantages of CMC for community-building and civic engagement. The final section asserts that citizenship will undergo significant change, in which formally established identities, locations and practices will give way to novel and multiple forms of citizenship that transcend the nation-state. Therefore, in the future citizenship will be characterised by more informal practices, non-traditional identities and alternative spaces.

The role of place in the construction of identity

The academic literature is rich with studies that draw connections between identity and place. This paper takes up Tuan’s (1977) definition of place as physical space invested with meaning. People’s relationships with place are complex, multifaceted and sometimes blend with perceptions of community, thereby combining physical and social aspects of place (Manzo and Perkins 2005). However, others have proposed that each involves a distinct cognitive process of identification (eg Brehm, Eisenhauer and Krannich 2006). A number of concepts have emerged to explain this kind of relationship including ‘sense of place‘, ‘place attachment‘, ‘place dependence‘ and ‘place identity‘ (Manzo 2003). With specific reference to place identity, evidence suggests that a person’s sense of self is partly generated by exposure to physical spaces (Korpela 1989; Proshansky, Fabian and Kaminoff 1983; Twigger Ross and Uzzell, 1996). Proshansky et al (1983) describe place-identity as ‘…a sub-structure of the self-identity of the person consisting of broadly conceived cognitions about the physical world in which the person lives.’ (p59). People identify with places through psychological investment over time and repeated encounters in which a set of meanings accumulates for that person; a ‘…pot-pourri of memories, conceptions, interpretations, ideas and related feelings about specific physical settings as well as other types of settings.’ (p60). Simply being exposed to a place does not lead to identification (Manzo and Perkins 2005), but when they do, the interactions, and the meanings that become attached to significant places underpin a person’s sense of self and belonging.

Disruption to place identity can have profound psychological consequences for individuals. A classic example comes from Fried (1963) in the context of the relocation of suburban community in Boston, Massachusetts. Fried observed a range of profound emotional responses akin to loss after the community was relocated to other parts of the city (see also Cuba and Hummon 1992). Twigger Ross and Uzzell (1996) remark that the sense of loss people experience in being forcibly relocated may persist for decades. This is because people are motivated to maintain a sense of self-continuity, which is sustained by a psychological connection to places that symbolise past selves (place-referent continuity) or transferable features of those places (place-congruent continuity). If this sense of self-continuity is disrupted the person may experience loss. Of course, this does not occur each time an individual moves to a new physical location. People may even choose high mobility lifestyles and some cultures are traditionally nomadic and do not exhibit the same type of emotional response. Twigger Ross (1996) and Giuliani (1991) speculate that key factors appears to be the strength of place-identity and whether the physical relocation is voluntary or not.

A contrasting view argues that as a cognitive construct, place-identity is vague and imprecise (eg Ponti 2005). Taking a broadly discursive psychological approach, an alternative body of work has sought to ‘displace‘ place identity from cognitive structure to discursive process (Dixon and Durrheim 2000; see also Haste in press). That is, the way that people talk about place identity is not taken as reflecting the reality of their cognitive relationships with places, but in terms of the realities constructed and legitimated by language (Edwards and Potter, 1992; Potter and Wetherell, 1987). In contrast to the assumption that place-identity (and identity more generally) is a fixed, internally consistent structure, place identity is constituted in social interaction rather than in the mind and enabled and constrained by available ways of talking about people’s relationships to places (Wetherell and Maybin 1996; Widdicombe 1998). Therefore, rather than investigating what place identity is, we should be examining what place identity does (Dixon and Durrheim 2000; Ponti 2005, Wallwork and Dixon 2004). Whichever perspective on place-identity is adopted, the connection between identity and place is of special importance with reference to community engagement and citizenship. Following what has already been written, the next section questions the assumption that community engagement is predicated on a person having some kind of identification with a place or community, based upon a sense of attachment to or affiliation with that place, in light of the way that identity is changing with the growth of CMC. Whilst community may be defined in a number of ways, in this paper ‘local community‘ is defined by a shared physical location roughly equivalent to ‘neighbourhood‘ as distinct from ‘virtual community‘, which is defined by shared interest (see Gaved and Anderson 2006 for a review of community definition). However, there are no hard boundaries; for example, members of online social networks may be defined by a shared physical location (eg Turner and Pinkett 2000).

It is generally assumed that a strong sense of place-identity is a positive thing and benefits both the individual (in terms of nurturing a sense of belonging, purpose and self-esteem) and the community (in terms of active community engagement) (Hay 1998; Low and Altman 1992; Perkins and Long 2002). In the literature, a variety of measures of place-identity have been found to be positively correlated with local community engagement (Brown, Douglas and Brown 2003), engagement in neighbourhood sustainability initiatives (Guardia and Pol 2002; Pol 2002), support for protection of the local landscape (Vorkinn and Riese 2001; Vaske and Kobrin 2001) and behaviours aimed at local water conservation (Bonaiuto, Bilotta, Bonnes, Ceccarelli, Martorelli and Carrus 2008).

Conversely, Lewicka (2005) found that place identification itself did not predict local community engagement, but required local social networks to translate people’s identification with place into civic activity. Foster-Fishman, Cantillon, Pierce and van Egern (2007) also note that a community needs to reach a kind of critical mass of perceptions including an awareness of community problems, community efficacy and local leadership before people will act. It may be that in the studies that did establish a link, a sufficient level of community social capital already existed. Therefore place-identity alone might not be sufficient to ensure community engagement. Identification with place may also be counterproductive according to some studies. Fried (2000) notes that individuals with lower levels of emotional investment in places are socially and economically advantaged because they tend to be more geographically mobile with broader social networks because they are less tied to places. Meanwhile, those who are emotionally invested in a place are effectively ‘localised‘ and socially and economically disadvantaged.

The future of place-identity

Whilst the findings are slightly mixed, they raise some interesting questions. For example, how will technological advances, particularly the growth of CMC influence place-identity and what might this mean for local community engagement and citizenship in the future? As advances in CMC continue apace, the way we think about the concept of identity will undoubtedly change. Bennett (2003) notes the ambivalence with which new understandings of identity have been anticipated; positively, in terms of granting the freedom to creatively fashion multiple identities, and negatively, in terms of the tyranny, insecurity and personal responsibility of reflexive self-determination (see also Giddens, 1991). New forms of identity have been taken as heralding the demise of traditional forms of identity based upon affiliations in physical space, leading to a fragmentation of local community and society. This concern stems from the assumption that online identities are inauthentic because they are disembodied, spatially dislocated and therefore effectively anonymous (Watt, Lea and Spears 2005).

In response to this, it should be noted that in both online and offline communication people ‘manage’ their identities in different ways, enhancing or concealing different parts of their character depending on the social context (Widdicombe 1998). Therefore, to a degree, the dichotomy between online and offline selves is a false one. In the immediate future the capacity for meaningful and emotional expression of self will continue to be limited by the design constraints of specific online networks. Currently, modes of online communication remain heavily text-based; however, this is changing and will continue to change. In the future, online communication will be less text-based and will enable new modes of expression with the development of new audio and visual communication media to ‘flesh out‘ online identities (Watt et al. 2005). Does this mean that people will be more constrained in constructing their online identities? Perhaps not, as recent evidence suggests that online identities may not be as inauthentic as some assert. Robinson (2007) argues that the differentiation of online and offline selves stems from studies of multi-user domains (MUDs) and generalised to all online identities. Conversely, in other forms of online communication people frame their identities in accordance with their offline selves. Moreover, it has been reported that people are sometimes more likely to disclose personal characteristics when online than in face-to-face interaction (Bargh, McKenna and Fitzsimons 2002).

It is likely that in the future place will constitute an important category for grounding identity online. Goodings, Locke and Browne (2007) remark how users of the social networking site MySpace constructed and authenticated their identities through past and shared experience of place, From this they argue that the concept of place is fundamental to identity in all ‘mediated’ communities (communities that are not defined on the basis of shared physical space). Whilst mediated communities are not geographically bounded, a sense of ‘shared locatedness‘ emerges from the interaction of its members to construct a shared identity linked to ‘virtual space‘ that the online community can effectively ‘inhabit‘. An alternative example of this occurs in the phenomenon of cultural diasporas. These are communities in which people may be geographically remote but experience a tangible sense of belonging that is mediated through spatial narratives of shared identity linked to common places. Hampton (2003) explains that the sense of loss experienced by members of online communities is similar to that experienced when a local community is physically relocated (eg Fried 1963).

In addition, some new forms of online social networking sites, such as Facebook, begin from established offline social networks as the basis for community affiliation, in which place (eg school, college or workplace) defines identity and membership (Goodings et al 2007). This is an interesting development as it supports the argument that online social networking sites are likely to be place-focused in the future, both in physical and virtual locations. Moreover, in transcending the virtual, online social networks enhance offline social networks creating the potential to increase social capital in local communities which, as discussed, may be an important precursor to community engagement (in addition to identification with place). Furthermore, Ellison, Steinfield and Lampe (2007) examined the relationship between social networking on Facebook and the formation and maintenance of offline community networks. They found that social networking sites like Facebook integrate online and offline networks, serving to maintain offline social ties. Meanwhile, Gaved and Anderson (2006) note the increasing proximity between online and offline social networks that in the past were viewed as being more exclusive. They go on to argue that place still matters; whilst CMC may liberate people from spatial constraints, leading to the creation of geographically unbounded social networks, it does not reduce the importance of place in terms of their identities and relationships.

The literature on local community responses to risk also underscores the importance of place and identity with reference to the way people frame their perceptions of environmental risks. This is in contrast to the post-modern idea that traditional structures such as the local community were declining in importance (eg Beck 1992; see also Ekberg 2007 and Mythen 2007 for a critique). In perceiving risks, people do not respond passively to external knowledge but engage in meaningful and active interpretation of risk communications and develop their own understandings. This takes place through the lens of local community experience (Horlick-Jones, Sime and Pidgeon 2003). Pidgeon, Henwood, Parkhill, Venables and Simmons (2008) emphasise the importance of understanding risk perceptions grounded in the local social, cultural and political context. Their research on communities living in close proximity to nuclear facilities in England suggests that risks intersect with people’s autobiographical narratives. Local risks were viewed as part of local life and nuclear facilities were broadly supported. Bickerstaff, Simmons and Pidgeon (2006) comment that in researching local community responses to risk, places are treated as simply physical backdrops, which overlooks the meaning-laden nature of risk. In their research into the experience of risk and risk management policies in the 2001 UK Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak, local people’s experience of risk was explicitly spatial in focus and shaped by complex constructions of place and identity. Local people constructed a marginal place identity through which the outbreak and centralised responses to the outbreak were interpreted and understood (eg central government ignoring local knowledge and community interests in a region that was already politically and economically subjugated).

Burningham and Thrush (2004) discuss how perceptions of local air pollution were interpreted in the context of local community life. They explain that rather than perceiving the pollution from the factory as problematic, it was accepted because the consequences of losing the factory, on which community identity and livelihood rested, was perceived as being greater than the air pollution threat (see also Bickerstaff and Walker 2001). Similar approaches have investigated locally and personally significant meanings as a framework for understanding wider perceptions of risk in the context of the meanings of woods and trees (Henwood and Pidgeon 2001; O’Brien 2005). This means that perceptions of risk may be less dependent on the provision of expert knowledge and more informed by local perceptions of community and place. For example, in the context of flood risk, local people sometimes rejected official Environment Agency ‘at risk’ status for their homes when it did not accord with evaluations based on local perceptions and experience (see also Bickerstaff and Walker 2001). Therefore, policymakers must move beyond the idea that local community responses are governed by a lack of information and the reductionist view of risk that fails to take local social, cultural and political context into account (Bickerstaff and Walker 2001).

The future of place-based communities

Further to the dichotomy of online/offline identity, it is likely that the existing distinction between online and offline communities will become less conspicuous in the future. Will this evolution will be to the detriment of existing local communities? The evidence suggests that this will not be the case because new modes of CMC promise to connect people to place as much as liberate them from place. There is a sense, particularly in social psychology that online social networks draw people away from face-to-face interaction and damage local community relations by facilitating modes of communication that transcend physical location (Watt et al, 2005). Some speculate that this will result in the death of local communities, reducing them merely to what Wellman, Quan-Haase, Boase, Chen, Hampton, Diaz and Miyato (2003) refer to as ‘quaint residuals‘.

Wellman, Quan-Haase, Boase, Chen, Hampton, Diaz and Miyata (2006) review a range of studies supporting the idea that communities are evolving in line with the proliferation of networked individualism (NI), which is displacing spatial community networks. This is because new networking devices connect to people rather than places. Wellman et al (2006) use the example of the telephone to illustrate this; whereas telephones would previously have been situated in fixed places for anyone to use, phones are now personal, portable devices. Other technological developments such as wireless internet also facilitate NI. This is leading to a shifting of the structure of community, whereby community networks are now less determined by shared physical location. For examples, communities are increasingly based upon shared interests rather than shared location and community ‘goods‘ (such as social support and information) are conveyed to individuals online rather than in the household or neighbourhood. This means that in the future we will be more likely to come to know our neighbours on the grounds of shared interests rather than on the grounds of shared location (Foth and Adkins 2006). As Foth and Adkins remark, physical proximity cannot be equated to social proximity.

However, despite these predictions, the role of local community relationships is unlikely to simply fade away. Apart from being unrealistic, the idea that one day we may conduct our social relationships almost exclusively online is somewhat depressing. Besides, most scholars would not subscribe to this bleak view of the future. An often overlooked but important point raised by Hampton (2002) criticises the idea that offline communities were constrained by their geography until liberated by the internet as archaic; previous technological developments in communications and transportation, such as the telephone and the steam train have, for a long time, enabled people to connect to social networks beyond their own neighbourhoods without threatening the existence of local communities. Wellman et al (2003) argue that the dichotomy between online and offline communities is a false one; virtual communities are unfavourably compared to an idealised geographically bounded, close-knit local community that never existed. Moreover, the distinction between physical space and cyberspace is also inappropriate because social ties increasingly transcend both spheres (Wellman 2001). It is more likely that rather than damaging the fabric of existing local communities, online communities will actually accentuate their importance and extend and enrich them.

For example, in a series of ongoing studies of ‘Netville‘, an experimental ‘wired‘ local community near Toronto, Wellman et al (2003) observed that those who used the online local community network were more engaged with their neighbours as well as with people more geographically distant. More specifically, users reported no negative impacts on their offline local social networks, had more offline face-to-face contact with their neighbours and wider offline social networks. Such research lends support to the argument that CMC does not necessarily mean the death of traditional place-based communities, but may facilitate engagement within such communities by expanding users’ personal networks, improving communication within the community and building trust and cooperation between members.

In order to gauge the impact of technological change for local communities in the future, it is necessary to look at how communities are currently sustained. As mentioned previously, the sharing of physical space does not of itself automatically lead to identification or affiliation with those with whom that space is shared. Taking a view of community as a process as opposed to structure, community is constructed and sustained through its (re)production in social interaction (see Haste, in press). This means that like online communities, offline communities should not be considered as something that exists independently ‘out there‘, but as a discursive formulation that becomes more or less important depending on the social context. This can be exemplified by looking at studies that report on local community conflict.

In studies of community conflict, the concept of local community takes on a novel significance. Whereas for most of the time people are not mindful of their membership of the local community, when place became threatened in some way campaign leaders mobilised the community as a heterogeneous, consensual entity defined in relation to place. In this context local community serves to galvanise support against a ‘common enemy’ whilst simultaneously masking multiple and sometimes contradictory political interests, goals and demands expressed locally. This has been used as a defence by local people in the context of grassroots campaigns against development at Anahim Lake, British Columbia (Larsen 2008), the proposed expansion of Stansted Airport, near London (Griggs and Howarth 2008) and central government measures to protect the Swedish wolf population (Sjölander-Lindqvist 2008). Community constructions are flexible. For example, they may intentionally construct the local community as marginalised (eg Bickerstaff, Simmons and Pidgeon 2006; Wallwork and Dixon 2004) or as representing common values (eg Della Porta and Piazza 2007). As Burningham (1996) comments, such communities do not reflect actual social divisions, but are socially constructed at different times for different purposes. For this reason, online communities should not automatically be considered inferior to online communities.

The future of citizenship

The final part of this paper considers how anticipated changes to identity and community brought about by technological change might impact upon citizenship in the future. It is argued that whilst more traditional forms of citizenship at the level of the nation-state are likely to give way to multiple forms, citizenship will continue to be located in spaces, whether physical or virtual. Wellman et al (2006) predict that the rise of NI and the ensuing impact on local communities will lead to a ‘fragmentation‘ of citizenship. The result will be multiple, distinct, mobilised citizenships based upon affiliations of individual interest rather than a general commitment to more traditional political values or ideology based upon one’s position in the social structure. They do not intend this to mean that issues concerning place or locality will no longer be of relevance to citizenship. What they do argue is that place will become simply another community of interest, rather than an organising principle of citizenship (as in the nation-state). What this means is that governments will need to radically alter their strategies for promoting non-territorial citizenship initiatives, targeting communities of shared interest rather than shared geography. This will require the development of novel, flexible forms of governance and democracy.

Some place-based citizenship initiatives are successful. Turner and Pinkett (2000), as part of their ‘Creating Community Connections Project‘, took an asset-based approach to local community development and conducted a year-long study in a low-income housing estate in Roxbury, Massachusetts. A local online neighbourhood network was used to map a wide range of local community amenities and services, for example, proving information on local resources including local businesses, associations and social groups. The corpus of information on local amenities and services was then collated online and made available to local residents via the internet either from home or at a local community centre. The aim of this was to create connections within and between people in the local community and to increase awareness of neighbourhood amenities and services, which, it was hoped would improve levels of civic engagement. After one year of the resource being set up, civic awareness amongst users of the resource was found to have significantly increased community social capital.

Bennett (2003b) suggests that many CMC initiatives aimed at encouraging political engagement are directed towards conventional political practices, where radical transformation is least likely to occur. At this level, transformation is likely to be limited to making communication networks more efficient and expansive. However, there is the future potential for transformation in democratic spaces outside the control of government and other established political institutions. This is because decentralised, online networks are beyond the control of political elites and provide a means of publicising an issue to a wide audience at little expense, allowing individuals and communities to compete with established organisations and institutions. Conversely, it is also these very features, celebrated as having potential for future citizenship practices, that give rise to the problems of ensuring effective decision-making and managing the vast range of diverse identities and interests in online network structures (Bennett 2003a)

Pell (2008) also claims that citizenship is being fragmented, though differs from Wellman et al (2006) by arguing that opportunities for civic engagement reside not in virtual spaces, but in new democratic spaces. She critiques the current structure of citizenship, whereby rights and obligations are commonly located at the level of the nation-state. This effectively brackets off opportunities for citizenship in alternative spaces. Therefore, political practices that take place outside of these spatial boundaries are denied legitimacy. However, Pell asserts that new and multiple forms of citizenship are emerging in alternative spaces. Ong (2006) concurs that attention should be directed towards emergent spaces that are fertile for the cultivation of citizenship (see also Dobson 2003).

One or two examples of new places for citizenship practices deserve mention here. Pell (2008) examines alternative locations and practices of citizenship in the context of a tactical housing squat (known as Woodsquat), which aimed to highlight urban homelessness. Pell reflects on how homeless people and their supporters occupied a derelict department store building. In doing so, activists sought to circumvent traditional modes of citizen engagement and engage instead at the level of their local community. Examples such as this indicate a more active form of citizenship, one that is not simply contracted by the state, but claimed by citizens. Pell explains that identifying with the local neighbourhood was as important as identifying as a member of the nation-state, thus raising the importance of physical spaces as places for the emergence of democratic citizenship.

In addition to the emergence of novel forms of identity and place for citizenship practice, new modes of CMC also present potential areas for new kinds of citizenship. Burgess, Foth and Klaebe (2006) explore a number of examples of everyday engagement with CMC media, including online chat, photo-sharing and blogging. They claim that these examples provide a means through which new and alternative practices of citizenship can emerge by creating opportunities for users to engage with online and offline communities and to discuss topics of shared interest or concern. Burgess et al refer to this as a form of ‘electronic democracy‘ that engages with the intricacies and nuances of culture, democracy and citizenship in the public sphere. It also necessitates a shift in the identities of engaged citizens, from receivers of mass forms of top-down, one-way communication, to producers and transmitters of information (Bennett 2003b).Burgess et al propose that CMC and online network media should do more in future to orient their guiding principles in ways that go beyond issues of ownership, content regulation and control, to cultivate technologies and practices that can allow citizenship practices to emerge through informal everyday practices. At present, the formalisation of democratic citizenship practices overlooks the contribution to be gained from alternative identities and spaces in terms of generating innovative methods of citizen engagement. In focusing initiatives in this way, it may be possible to build community networks and promote civic engagement in ways that are more meaningful and important to citizens.

Conclusion

As technological advances gather momentum it seems natural to question how things will change in the future. At the same time, it is difficult to comprehend that things will change. It is difficult to foresee any truly revolutionary impacts for identity, community and citizenship in the future. As a result, the predictions made in this paper are somewhat conservative and unavoidably myopic. Whilst, disappointingly perhaps, averring from making any wildly speculative predictions involving extraterrestrials, robots or global apocalypse, this paper has sought to highlight the continued importance of place with reference to the concepts discussed.

It would seem that a future where identity is dislocated from place is tantamount to a future where identity is relinquished altogether. Current evidence suggests that people will continue to define their identities in relation to places, and there is little reason to suppose that the growth of CMC in the coming decades will alter this; as embodied subjects we are always spatially positioned. Clearly, people value places. Nonetheless, a shift is likely to occur in terms of ‘anchoring’ identities to virtual spaces, which appear to have an emotional resonance akin to physical places. Initiatives aimed at increasing civic engagement are advised to design interventions that strengthen identification with place. This will involve better understanding the diverse meanings that places hold for people. However, whilst being necessary for civic engagement, identification with place is not sufficient. Therefore, interventions must also ensure that communities possess sufficient social capital in order to motivate people into action.

Furthermore, initiatives should be careful not to overlook the increasing importance of the self-determining capacity of people in constructing their own virtual spaces, which are likely to fulfil a similar function as referents for identity. It is unlikely that identification with physical spaces will diminish as virtual spaces flourish. However, it may well be that in time virtual spaces appear to be almost as ‘real’ as a person’s physical surroundings. Strategies for civic engagement will also need to attend to the developing relationship between online and offline community networks. Virtual communities seem set to become more ephemeral and characterised by self-interest and limited to specific forms of action. This makes it more difficult for policymakers to decide where to target their interventions; it is likely that they will be required to gear interventions more towards communities of shared interest rather than shared location. Whilst the barrier between online and offline communities will become more permeable, local communities will continue to be of some relevance, whether as communities of interest or otherwise. For example, representations of local community are still important and will continue to function as a symbol of solidarity for people sharing a geographical location, for example, to rally against development and outsider interests. It is through such processes that community is sustained.

Finally, citizenship appears to be the concept to be most radically transformed by technological and social change. The literature proposes that citizenship in its current form, as a contract of rights and duties between citizen and nation state, will gradually give way to multiple forms of identity, location and citizenship practice that transcend the traditional model. In order to deal with this, governments and institutions must also adopt more flexible and loose approaches to promoting citizenship. Policymakers may choose to look at novel ways of encouraging engagement through the provision of new media tools based around CMC. This could empower and encourage citizens to develop their own informal practices online, rather than using preset formats and agendas. Alternatively, policymakers could consider ways in which to allow citizenship to blossom in physical spaces that transcend the nation-state. For example, planning interventions could think about architectural designs that incorporate novel forms of public space that might encourage the blossoming of citizenship. More work is needed that underlines the significance of place for community engagement. A more complete psychological understanding of people-place relationships is central to this venture, and its importance cannot be overstated.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation. References

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This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

The starting point for this review is the assumption of a globalised world characterised by interdependent network spaces, the diminished importance of distance, and the existence of multiple spatialities of organisation and practice, as well as the availability of multiple geographies of belonging (Amin, 2002). From a theoretical perspective, Bourdieu’s (1990, 1999) work on fields and the concept of habitus recurs due to an increased sociological research emphasis on and interest in embodied practices in a world characterised by fluidity and flexibility. This fluidity has also been recognised by Cliff, O’Malley and Taylor (2008: 18) who argue that:

“…the blurring of distinctions between boundaries, at multiple levels: blurring between the personal/private and the public; between the individual identity and group identity, and therefore between individual output and group output; between what is part of the digital landscape and what is “reality”; between formal and informal learning; between work, play and education…”

will be key issues in the future. The flexibility of residence and increasing mobility is present in contemporary society in the form of migration and the fact that today’s societies are both emigrant and immigrant societies. The new kind of migration characterised by extra-territoriality and anchors instead of roots for identification then “casts a question mark upon the bond between identity and citizenship, individual and place, neighbourhood and belonging” (Bauman, 2008). Another trend which has been recognised by academic and policy circles alike is the decline in formal political engagement (Cornwall, 2008) and therefore “alternative ways of ensuring that voices are heard are required” (National Consumer Council, 2004: 10 quoted in Clarke and Newman, 2007).

Argument: locality, place and territories matter through virtual and material boundaries

Although globalisation processes are characterised by a diminished importance of space, they are also evident in a “transformation of practice and experience which is felt actually within localities” (Tomlinson, 1999, p9, emphasis in original). While there is an argument for the blurring between public and private spheres, there is also a debate about the growing diversification of social fields (Fowler, 1997). As people occupy multiple relationships and multiple subject positions, there are two opposing trends: a striving for belonging (feeling similar) and a striving for distinction (feeling separate).

Conceptions of citizenship and belonging need to be rethought as the nation-state as the preferred scale of political involvement has been de-centred. This means including practices such as social action, volunteering (Lister et al, 2002) and other than nominally formal political practices in the community (both real and virtual) in the notion of citizenship as well as allowing belonging to multiple communities (cf. Pell, 2008; Purcell, 2003). This leads to the evolution of different political practices in emerging public spheres – sites of emergent democratic citizenship.

Citizenship is an embodied practice and can be seen as a consequence of dispositions acquired in the private sphere. In this sense, the boundaries between public and private are indistinct and thus the personal is political and the political personal. Technology facilitates and exacerbates this blurring and thus opens avenues for direct democracy and widened access but unevenly distributed access can also reproduce existing hierarchies of power (cf. Cass, Shove and Urry, 2005).

Accessibility then becomes the main concern. Penetration of digital technologies has increased over the years but access to technology remains linked to patterns of social exclusion, with the most socially disadvantaged being the least likely to have or use access to digital technology. Barriers to access are then not only determined by inappropriate market provision and affordability but also by lack of confidence, skills and support. With the lack of digital technology skills becoming the new illiteracy stigma (OPM, 2008), the digital and social divide amplify each other.

Studies and data

1. Communities and place

The concept of community

There is an extensive sociological and anthropological literature on the changing meanings of community (Davies and Jones, 2003; Pahl, 2005; Philipson and Thompson, 2008) paying attention to the questions of disembedding and de-territorialisation of social relations in modernity which seem to have become accepted trends in the field (starting with Bell and Newby, 1971 and continued in Giddens, 1990; Tomlinson, 1999). Diminishing importance of space has also been claimed by Castells (1998, 2001), with special reference to the influence of ICT and the internet as appropriate medium of communication for the type of society and social relationships that he envisaged. Despite the ubiquity of the disembedding and de-territorialisation claims, local identifications, ie “communities-on-the-ground” (Pahl, 2005; Savage, Bagnall and Longhurst, 2005) and attachment to place have remained salient.

These questions have also been examined in the context of socio-economic transformation and regeneration where place identity and the forms it takes through community engagement have been considered central issues. Such studies have covered deprived neighbourhoods especially in old industrial regions (eg the author’s own research; Bennett, Beynon and Hudson, 2000; Harding, 1997; Waddington, 2003) and dynamic city centres (e.g. O’Connor and Wynne, 1996, Binnie and Skeggs, 2004) as well as (middle-class) residential areas (Savage, Bagnall and Longhurst, 2005).

A particularly promising attempt seems to be an approach which links networks, ie people’s interconnectedness, class and place as suggested by Blokland and Savage (2001). Liepins (2000) examines different approaches to the concept with particular reference to rural communities, and highlights the move away from community as a “fixed object” to a scale of inquiry, a symbolic construction (eg Cohen, 1985) or investigations of power where the politics of contrasting voices, spaces and actions can be considered. Neal and Walters (2008) also deal with the contentious nature of community, stressing the need to explain it rather than seeing it as the explanation (Alleyne, 2002). They highlight the importance of the material aspect of community, ie the actual social relations and groupings in addition to the symbolic aspects of community as repository of meaning. Community remains both a discourse and a practice; it operates on the symbolic and the personal (and therefore physical) level. This means that places continue to matter as the basis of shared socio-spatial practices.

There seem to be two trends concerning the challenge of the meaning of place and space for individual and collective identities and their expression in “communities”: a re-definition of the local and the development of cosmopolitan identities.

Redefining local identity and belonging – ‘elective belonging’

In a society characterised by flexibility, mobility and fluidity the construction of local identity has become more precarious – less inherited and based on a shared past, but more practised and performed. The argument is that the emergence of mobile fields and the disjunctures between a growing number of fields has led to a heightened importance of “ordinariness”, a heightened importance of the commonality of shared positions. Belonging is fluid and contingent. This provides for a community of strangers, according to Simmel, those who come today and stay tomorrow. It also, however, presupposes agency and choice. Choice is here seen as a value, a sign of achievement – mobility is the norm (cf. Beck, 2000), staying in the place you were born and brought up in is deviant:

“[a]ll of us are , willy-nilly, by design or by default, on the move. We are on the move even if, physically we stay put: immobility is not a realistic option in a world of permanent change. And yet the effects of that new condition are radically unequal. Some of us become fully and truly ‘global’; some are fixed in their ‘locality’ – a predicament neither pleasurable nor endurable in the world in which the ‘globals’ set the tone and compose the rules of the life-game.” (Bauman, 1998, p2)

In tune with the idea of the “elective biography” (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002), local identity, too, has become a choice – “elective belonging” (Savage et al, 2005). This starts from the fact that (social and geographical) mobility has increased and thus life-long connections with one place to establish a particular “fixed” local identity and sense of belonging are becoming less likely. Referring to a study of middle-class residential areas in Manchester (Savage et al, 2005) Savage (2008) argues that “the actual lived history of the place in which they [interviewees] lived was less important as the way in which they could define the place as belonging to them through their conscious choice to move and settle in it” (p.152). For the “mobile classes” place then remains important as manifestation of their “lifestyle” or consumer choice. The element of choice is essential in this identification and understanding of place because according to Savage (2008: 153) for those who do not possess the necessary resources, “nostalgia becomes the counterpart to elective belonging.”

To juxtapose this story of nostalgia, a look at post-industrial, formerly “traditional” working-class communities is necessary. Valerie Walkerdine’s research on communities in the South Wales valleys and my research on mining communities in Kent has shown that individuals do not stay in these places out of a longing for an idealised past but due to the persistence of social networks linking family, friends and (former) work-places (see also Strangleman, 2001; Parry, 2003). Research participants explained how the social infrastructure which used to be supported by the economic infrastructure (ie the colliery or the local steel plant) is now predominantly linked to the particular village and individual residents’ commitment – and in this sense to a notion of local citizenship. There are opportunities and threats in this very local notion of belonging. On the one hand, this should strengthen the need for all local residents’ involvement in local affairs, including children and young people. On the other hand, in my study, this facilitated a sense of insularity and lack of awareness of similar issues and experiences in other places. Here, digital technologies can help to bridge gaps and facilitate links between “local citizens” within and between localities.

In Savage et al’s (2005) study individuals are assumed to be free in their choices – to move or to stay. This does not take into account economic or social necessities. It is presupposed that moving socially requires moving geographically while staying put equals displacement. Constraints posed by power hierarchies are neglected. Mobility and the capacity for mobile/multiple identities, however, are dependent on resources. In their study of East German youth, Hörschelmann and Schäfer (2007) conclude that young people’s desire to travel, to become “cosmopolitan/global”, was shaped by different motivations and expectations, which in turn were influenced by education, parental influence and material opportunity, or, in other words, social, economic and cultural relations of power. Mobility has a class dimension. DIY biographies and mobile selves are accessible to those with the necessary economic, social and cultural capital – and this is true for the offline and the online world, as those most socially disadvantaged are also those most likely to be digitally excluded.

Cosmopolitan identities

Szerszynski and Urry (2002, 2006) argue for the emergence of a spatially dispersed culture of cosmopolitanism which involves awareness and knowledge of other places, cultures and people. It combines abilities and dispositions, eg a willingness to take risks, curiosity about other places, as well as an ability to read different images (Szerszynski and Urry, 2006). Such cosmopolitan ways of thinking need to be incorporated into people’s identities, everyday practices, rituals and dispositions to become an effective force in the world (Beck and Sznaider, 2006). As with the concept of elective belonging, spatial mobility and spatial awareness become paramount to the knowledge and understanding of a particular place’s history/histories. Being part of a cosmopolitan community is not dependent on a shared and collectively remembered past but on the experience and appreciation of similar socio-spatial practices and rituals. From a negative perspective, this can take on the semblance of tolerance when this actually means tolerance of a similarly “open” lifestyle, eg similar political, ethical, consumption choices. Thus, the internationally mobile professional can feel at home anywhere suitably cosmopolitan, eg New York, London, Berlin or Sydney, among other suitably cosmopolitan professionals. They might, however, face difficulties in participating in the leisure and work patterns of small rural hamlets.

The aims of education then become instilling a disposition towards, an acceptance of, and an ability to deal with, mobility – intellectually, physically, virtually. Education needs to prepare for flexibility and the possibility of multiple trajectories and ideally counteract the fact that the access to choice is still “heavily circumscribed by social, cultural, and economic relations of power” (Hörschelmann and Schäfer, 2007, p1869). As much as the global is increasingly present in the local and in young people’s daily experience, this experience is also structured by existing power hierarchies where choice is easily turned into necessity and the tourist turns into the migrant or vice versa (cf Bauman, 1998).

2. Questions of citizenship

“The common conception of citizenship is that of belonging to a political community, with the ensuing rights and responsibilities of membership.” (Pell, 2008, p143)

Citizenship is a political project as much as it is a sociological concept. It is inextricably bound up with the powers that be at any point in time. Therefore, future projections of the meaning of citizenship are particularly difficult. It can be assumed, however, that “traditional” notions of citizenship have become problematic. There are different ways in which citizenship is currently being reconfigured:

• (a) A (passive) notion of citizenship which is based solely on citizenship activities which are predetermined and contained in the institutions of the state (Pell, 2008), eg voting rights and participation in the electoral process, has become obsolete.
• (b) Membership of traditional collective organisations such as parties and trade unions has been replaced by alternative forms of engagement, eg social movements, issue-based politics and the politics of the everyday.
• (c) Citizenship is being rescaled, re-territorialised and re-oriented away from the nation-state as the predominant political community (Purcell, 2003).

Following on from the argument above, ie that place retains meaning both as a basis of a particularly local as well as a cosmopolitan community, this has implications for citizenship. As belonging to place is performed and thus contingent, so is citizenship. It is no longer solely defined by the nation-state but by other forms of engaging with state power, which opens up opportunities for multiple belongings and thus multiple citizenships.

As the role of the state shifts and as more complex and ‘messy’ governance mechanisms evolve (Woods and Goodwin, 2003), future forms of citizenship might be based on mundane, proto-political forms of engagement and community-making, especially as a manifestation of belonging. While Bauman’s (2008) analysis stresses the diversity of lifestyles and options, ie the fact that territorially determined citizenship turns into the right to remain different, Savage et al (2005) see this as the basis for solidarity and potential for collective action. Bauman emphasises the precarity and ephemeral nature of such bonds as “it is a moot question whether it is fit to conceive group solidarity in any other form than that of the fickle and fray, predominantly virtual ‘networks’, galvanised and continually re-modelled by the interplay of individual connecting and disconnecting, making calls and declining to reply [to] them.” For Savage et al (2005) the potential for collective action lies in the fact that a lack of feeling at home all the time increases the importance of feeling at home some of the time. This would motivate individuals to opt into shared practices. Place thus becomes valuable to the individual even if they are no longer part of a community rooted in place, the community is rooted in practice.

Place and residence becomes the basis for civic engagement (cf. Purcell, 2003). Pahl (2005) argues that common awareness of a social situation is required for any community to act as collectivity. Such common awareness, if it is no longer provided by a shared past, can only be drawn from a shared present, the co-presence in the everyday which is manifest in local social capital. This is evident in community participation, especially in local planning and governance processes, which has been seen as indicative of a combination of local identification and social cohesion. Another example is parental involvement in schools which can also be redefined as proto-political, civic engagement (cf. Savage et al, 2005). These practices are not place-specific but place-bound in that they have to be enacted in a particular place and thus provide the basis for “community” in contrast to “local” involvement. Sociological literature has dealt with the concept of active citizenship in the context of mechanisms of governmentality (Marinetto, 2003).

This is often linked to ideas of the state enabling and empowering citizens but the notion of empowerment through engagement has been heavily criticised and contested. In this conceptualisation the state confers the status of citizenship onto the individual, which highlights the passivity assigned to citizenship. New forms of engagement, however, are more creative and proactive and are linked to individuals creating their own political spaces, their own emergent public spheres, virtual or material. An example of this is the trend towards the citizen-consumer. Here citizenship is found in life-politics (eg Giddens, 1991) and the everyday act of consumption is a site for individuals’ political involvement. The supermarket becomes a political space. Digital technologies and especially the internet then provide access to a greater consumer choice and information which will enhance the (political) power of the consumer (Scammell, 2000).

Part of the drive for active citizens has been the emphasis on inclusive and accountable networks for citizens, ie the manifestation of different practices of citizenship. Davies (2007) describes this as the current network ‘orthodoxy’ in UK policy studies. The citizen-consumer as envisaged by New Labour, ie the individual exercising choice in pursuit of individual wants (Clarke et al, 2006), can be motivated to be involved in the institutions providing public services. Recent research has therefore focused on the partnership approach as one form of democratic inclusion/deliberative democracy (Ball and Maginn, 2005; Perrons and Skyers, 2003). Davies (2007) and the author’s own research showed that “community” knowledge and understanding of partnerships or the regeneration/planning process can contrast dramatically with policy understanding and knowledge. Residents in a former mining community in Kent who were included in the local regeneration forum still felt excluded from the actual decision-making process. Their idea of involvement also meant ownership of the regeneration outcome, the regenerated space (in this case through heritage displays, ie a performance of a shared past). As their plans were not incorporated for a number of economic/political reasons, the residents felt powerless rather than empowered and thus ultimately disadvantaged.

Thus particular forms of community participation reproduce existing power inequalities rather than empower the residents. The problem arises because the gap between the cultural capital needed to participate in “legitimate” nominally participatory structures, and the cultural capital available in those groups which are supposedly most able to benefit from those structures is not acknowledged or articulated (cf Davies, 2007). Questioning the empowerment effects of particular governance mechanisms then leads to questioning the neo-liberal idea of “active citizenship”. Active citizenship might not be achieved within the constraints of state institutions but requires the creation of political and public places which resonate with the social and cultural capital of the affected communities. Here, access to and use of digital public spaces might be particularly helpful as a recent community campaign in Kent (www.save-wye.org) has shown.

As residence and the politics of the everyday take on more prominence in the constitution of citizenship, the question of permanence and sustainability arises. Amit and Rappaport (2002) emphasise the short-lived nature of circumstantial associations such as with neighbours, work colleagues, club members and also fellow parents at parents’ associations. The importance and feeling of belonging of such consociate relationships depends on the continued involvement in the contexts in which they were formed. This is of particular importance in communities undergoing major socio-economic transformation where the traditional forms of association (trade unions, working-men’s clubs) lose their centrality. In these cases a focus for the maintenance of community becomes essential. Neal and Walters (2008) argue that the material relationships are enhanced through the dual belonging to a material place and an imagined community, in their case the rural community (cf.also Anderson, 1983).

In my research, this is similarly true, as the notion of the (symbolic) mining community was regularly mobilised and referred to in the description of everyday life in the village. The symbolic community is then constructed through campaigns for statues representing the preferred image of the village, village carnivals or newsletters. These place-making activities also need to allow space for young people as citizens and competent actors within the community, so that they can make their own communities as part of (or even in spite of) the local everyday spaces of (adult) community (cf. Panelli et al, 2002). As Weller (2003, p164) describes, “local boundaries shape the everyday spaces of citizenship and belonging for the teenagers (…) [so that] in the immediate future citizenship will be acted out at the local level.”

In conclusion then, citizenship is increasingly linked to the local and local, everyday practices. So the emphasis is then placed on recognition of citizenship practice rather than the bestowal of citizenship rights and it could be argued that this citizenship practice is undergoing transformation in the light of technological advances. Community-making practices encompass both community responsibility and care, and social pleasure and conviviality. The line between a citizen and someone practising community then becomes blurred as the proto-political, small-scale activities as a result of convivial practices make the social and political capital of social organisations visible. This means that social organisations can wield power and influence in local governance processes despite being nominally outside of the political process which illustrates the idea of the emergent public sphere. Although Neal and Walters (2008) discuss this in the rural context they also draw parallels to Thrift’s (2005) analysis of “lighter touch urban politics”.

The common denominator in studies of participation and citizenship seems to have become the importance of everyday activities and the resonance of the everyday in the political sphere and vice versa (cf Macnaughten, 2003). The argument is especially important when coupled with the recommendation by FreshMinds (2008) which highlights the importance of meaningful benefits of digital technologies in mundane activities for non-users to integrate them into their daily life. If, therefore, small-scale activities which lead to a feeling of belonging and an affective connection with place- or non-place-based social groups can be enhanced by digital technologies this can facilitate their uptake and prohibit a deepening of the digital divide.

Conclusions and directions

“Technology alone does not transform government, but government cannot transform to meet modern citizens’ expectations without it … The vision … is also about making government transformational through the use of technology…” (Cabinet Office, 2005)

As I discussed above, the role of the state in the construction of community and citizenship is changing. Digital technologies can drive this process forward and the integration of ICTs into the mechanisms of government has been described as a goal for transformational government. Enhanced ICTs can have particularly beneficial effects for organisations, institutions and for individual citizens, employees or social groups in the form of access to new opportunities and capabilities (CIOC, 2006). An important potential benefit is the integration of “direct democracy”, ie citizen engagement and polling, with the existing form of representative democracy where decisions are made via elected representatives. Commentators on the Obama campaign emphasised the successful engagement of the grass roots through digital technologies. Citizenship education, therefore, will mean making visible all the different routes to political participation with digitally enhanced ways of community-making and political action providing particularly fruitful opportunities for the creation of new public spheres.

Digital inclusion is linked to social inclusion. FreshMinds (2008, p5) argue that digital equality can mitigate “social inequalities derived from low incomes, poor health, limited skills or disabilities.” There could therefore be a virtuous circle: digital inclusion can enhance social inclusion and thus community engagement and social cohesion. Digital inclusion does not only mean the provision of ICT skills, it also means building up of trust among disadvantaged groups – in the public service providers as well as ICTs (DIT, 2007) so that the danger of a reproduction of offline exclusion in the online world can be addressed, and the potential of virtual communities as providing open, accessible, more democratic, alternative and safe spaces (Evans 2004) can be achieved.

Active citizenship does not only require cultural capital in the sense of openness and awareness of spaces for creative engagement but also digital literacy. This is becoming necessary to participate in contemporary and future society as lack of ICT skills is perceived to “greatly restrict” what adults can do privately and professionally (FreshMinds, 2008, p34). This suggests a particular subjectivity to participate fully:

“Access is still not enough: nearly two fifths of non-users fail to see the need or benefit of using the internet and other ICTs or feel that they are not the right kind of person to use them. The greatest share of the population who hold this view is the elderly and those on low incomes. These groups were also the most likely to not use the internet – even if they had a connection at home.” (2008: 37, my emphasis).

This means that attitudes towards technology are as important as affordability: both cultural and economic capital are required to deal with the information society. Here it is possible to refer to the discussion of “Digital Natives” by Prensky (2001) and Ellen Helsper in the context of this project. It could be argued that the 65+ generation of 2030 will have been socialised into the use of digital technologies and therefore the problem of lack of motivation and perceived need might not arise. This, however, does not address the lack of motivation and perceived need for those on low incomes – the digital divide is deepening for those who are not included and are not using digital technologies and thus are at risk at being left behind even further (FreshMinds, 2008, OPM, 2008). There remains a spatial element to social inclusion, however. As long as affordability of access rather than motivation to access is an issue, rural areas miss out on the availability of cheaper technology which is based on residential clusters. If these inequalities can be reduced then motivation becomes the main factor in digital inclusion.

Trends, surprises, predictions

“Attention to continuity is important for a number of reasons, among which is the capacity of social arrangements to persist despite expectations to the contrary.” (Crow, 2005, p3.2)

Trends

Places, territories and boundaries – both symbolically and materially – will continue to matter in everyday practices

In the discussion above, socio-spatial practices matter for the performance of citizenship has been regularly highlighted. The notion of the nation-state based citizenship is becoming obsolete as a result of the parallel tendencies towards localised and cosmopolitan identities. Residence becomes the basis for the political community (cf. Purcell, 2003). At the same time, the political is being redefined to include everyday and so-called “proto-political” activities. With regard to the interplay of belonging and technology, Savage et al (2005, p207) illustrate that fields of practice vary in their spatial extension, while some fields (eg cinema, music) “deploy IT to permit considerable spatial extension, yet other fields, notably that of residence, do not.” Following from this, then, it is possible to say that locality and boundaries remain important for identification. This can be translated into the digital world and efforts to construct and conceptualise digital territories are evidence for this: “without digital boundaries, the fundamental notion of privacy or the feeling of being at home will not take place” (Beslay and Hakkala, 2007, p69, emphasis in original). Beslay and Hakkala (2007) therefore suggest the concept of a virtual residence to tackle concerns about privacy, security and identity.

Belonging, whether offline or online, is performed through everyday practices. Therefore notions of citizenship need to be linked to the everyday, the individualised, embodied experience of social/political issues. Citizenship is thus no longer a status that is granted but a practice that is performed. Top-down-initiated participatory regimes will falter as more and more “community” activists will chose an exit-action strategy (Davies, 2007) and build their own stages and public spheres – both offline and online – for engagement and action.

Accessibility matters – social and cultural capital becomes digital capital and vice versa

Communities and engagement are both based on sharing of, and access to, information. Future technological developments open up a range of avenues, eg the ubiquitous access to information via ambient intelligent systems. The question remains, however, whether the fact that access can be limited to certain groups of people on the basis of their membership of the information-”owning” (producing) institution or their access to the technology is qualitatively different to mechanisms of distinction and exclusion available and practised now. FreshMinds (2008) argue that the digital divide between those who are confident and motivated to use digital technologies and those who are not is deepened despite being narrowed. Although there are fewer people who are excluded, those who are, are so on a deeper level. This also applies to the idea that communities can become the basis of participation. Therefore, engagement is based on information and the access to information. “In the future, people will be able to leave virtual yellow post-it stickers where they want to. The only difference is in the visibility; they may be seen by everybody or only those who are allowed or only those who are able to see them” (Beslay and Hakkala, 2007, p75). This highlights the importance of equal access to technology and the necessary skills and confidence.

Surprises

Discussions of residence as the basis of citizenship and political engagement have neglected the class dimension. Little has been said about the geometries of power and social, economic and cultural constraints in building multiple identities and citizenships, especially for young people. There is a need to bring this dimension into any discussion of belonging and paths to citizen engagement. Class remains one of the determining factors of the embodied experience of the everyday and especially manifest in the places we live in. It therefore also remains a determining factor in the social relationships and communities that individuals form.

Predictions: possible – plausible – preferable futures

In the future, digital technologies will be part of everyday life, more so than now. From a dystopian perspective then, if the current importance of consumption as dominant mode of expression is combined with the proliferation of citizenships which are based locally but can also be exercised through digital technologies, then there could be a market for online political engagement and expression. Multiple identities and citizenships can then also mean a proliferation of interest groups which cater for ever more extremist tastes and interests. A more positive view would see a growth in political awareness and literacy through a sense of global citizenship. This would lead to mass grassroots mobilisation for global issues such as the environment, poverty, and human rights as digital technologies make the actual embodied experience of these issues accessible for everyone, even the privileged middle class in Western democracies.

Access to digital technologies is dependent on confidence, skill and dispositions. It is therefore plausible that cultural capital will become “digital capital.” Skill refers here not only to digital literacy but also to the ability to live in a globalised world and deal with mobility and flexibility. Digital technologies will enable multiple identities as several places “happen” at the same time and several time periods can “happen” at the same time with information about past, present and future on constant display.

Access to the past provides a basis for a shared awareness of one place and thus “community”, awareness of the relevance of everyday actions for a potential future can mobilise social action, and combining this sense of shared issues and their impact on a shared future can enhance the sense of the “global imagined community.” The response can be in self-reflective individuals building their own DIY biographies (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002) which are expressed in socio-spatial practices characterised by mobility and thus enabling openness and creating opportunities to deal with the o/Other rather than constructing imaginary boundaries, be that virtually or materially. Technology can help prepare for change and movement but can also provide a much needed anchor in a de-territorialised world and biography. The availability of multiple citizenships and the increased engagement through everyday practices and experiences facilitated through technology then also means a greater sense of ownership in more and more personalised campaigns around social issues.

Before such a normalisation of ICTs in everyday practices is achieved, however, it is of utmost importance to close the digital divide and motivate non-users to engage with digital technologies and promote transcending the offline/online dichotomy. Only when those who are perceived to be excluded and who perceive themselves to be excluded from the digitised world can be motivated and access for them can be facilitated can digital technologies contribute to dealing with social inequalities. Without the necessary (state-led) support to develop skills and confidence to deal with the opportunities and the threats of the risk society, then young people might “stay put” which will pose significant risks for personal biographies in locations where work and training opportunities are scarce (cf Hörschelmann and Schäfer, 2005).

The role of education is then the provision of skills and abilities to deal with plurality, ambiguity and the adaptability to change (Springate, 2004). This means training for collaborative environments, understanding of complex systems and the encouragement of creativity. Society is faced with the consequences of complex political-economic systems and everyone, not only young people, needs to be prepared to be willing to learn about, understand and engage with them to enable change. The citizens of the future need to be able to navigate fluid material and virtual worlds and therefore need to be adaptable, familiar with complex systems and creative in their creation of engaging and engaged places.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

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Another interesting point here is an issue around ownership: while Andrew Harrison in his submission to Futurelab argued that ownership of property is becoming less and less important, it is interesting to note as Angus Cameron (2008) does that even virtual universes such as Second Life are based on land ownership principled copied from the politico-economic system of the “real” world.

The scenario painted by them is very much reminiscent of Marge Piercy’s He, She, It (1991).

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.