Leisure and consumption

Traditional anchors for identity, such as occupation or region, now compete with, or are replaced by, identities based upon consumption, lifestyle and leisure (Giddens, 1991). Leisure-based activities have increasingly become important indicators of who we are and our place in society, including how we understand civic and political participation. A series of shifts have occurred which have further strengthened the relationships between consumption and identity for young people. These include delaying responsibilities associated with adulthood and independent living, an increase in communication media, and developments in advertising and marketing.

The cost of living and of higher education are two factors that have led to British youth delaying their participation in responsibilities associated with adulthood, such as independent living, home ownership or parenthood. Depending on their socio-economic status, on average, young people remain either financially dependent on their parents, or contribute financially to the parental home, until their late twenties (Parker, Aldridge & Measham, 1998). Without the need to pay for mortgages or children this delayed access to adult responsibilities means that young people often have more time and money for leisure than had previous generations.

The ability to consume has been further enhanced through developments in technology that have given young people unprecedented access to information on a multitude of consumption and leisure practices and to the people and communities who participate in them. Such technologies include the internet, increases in the number of television channels, and changes in publishing that have reduced production costs, making specialist smaller readership magazines commercially viable.

Young people are also targeted by those interested in commercially exploiting youth markets, including, for example, regional governments who have seen young adults’ consumption in bars and clubs as the solution to city centre regeneration (Chatterton & Hollands, 2003). A range of aggressive and insidious marketing techniques have been developed and used to target young people, including, for example, giving popular children free products to promote to their peer group. So while there has always been a complex interaction between the media, consumer interests and ‘authentic’ youth culture (Riley & Cahill, 2005) young people today experience unprecedented exposure to commercial pressures (see, for example, discussions of ‘ethnographic marketing’, ‘viral advertising’ and ‘KGOY’ (Kids growing older younger).

Branding and other marketing practices have intimately linked identity with consumption. For example, young men may identify as a ‘rebel’ by buying particular clothes rather than having participated in any act considered rebellious (Gill, Henwood & McClean, 2005). There is considerable debate over the agency young people have regarding consumption and identity. Young people are not necessarily passive consumers and while they may be attracted to particular identities associated with branded materials they may take these items and rework them in various ways, including parody. Others argue however, that the notion of agency is itself an illusion of discourses of consumption, or at the very least, subversion through consumption has limitations. (For an example of the debates on agency and consumption in relation to young women and sexualised clothing see Duit & van Zoonen (2006, 2007) and Gill (2007)).

The relationships between traditional anchors of identity and those produced through consumption and leisure are also disputed. Indeed, analyses of ‘changing times’ tend to be anecdotal, with limited empirical work available (www.identities.org.uk). It is likely, however, that young people’s subjectivities are constructed through a variety of identities shaped by ‘traditional’ orientations to class, region, family and gender, and more ‘liquid’, flexible ones orienting around leisure-based activities, such as sports or shopping. Thus, leisure and consumption-based identities may not have replaced traditional anchors for identity, rather, when young people had access to them these identities may sit alongside each other, being drawn upon when contextually relevant (Riley, Griffin & Morey, 2008). Having access to, and being able to participate in, both traditional and liquid identities is subject to a complex interaction of personal and social variables, but is linked to social inequality. For example, working class children are more likely to have a TV in their bedroom, increasing the amount of advertising to which they are subjected (Mayo, 2005).

Multiplicity

As well as opening up opportunities for leisure and consumption increases in communication media have offered a plethora of ways of understanding ourselves. In having access to, for example, history programmes about life in ancient Egypt, soap operas with evil twins, or channels dedicated to extreme sports, young people grow up in a world in which they have literally seen it all before. Thus, the proliferation and globalisation of near instant forms of technological communication make available a dynamically-shifting range of stories and forms of knowledge that can inform young people’s identity management. Subjectivity, then, is not considered to be constructed from pre-formed essences which exist independently outside of time, talk or other social activity, but are constantly (re)produced in interaction, constructed from the range of subject positions available to the individual, which may be contradictory or only partially formed.

Developments in communication technologies have intensified relationships between subjectivity and technology. There has always been a link between subjectivity and technology, for example using a hammer allows a person to experience their arm as a lever (Burkitt, 1999). However, distinctions between bodies, selves and technology have increasingly blurred, leading analysts to talk of cyborg as a metaphor for understanding contemporary subjectivity in which the boundaries between organism and machine are transgressed and from which new senses of self emerge (Gergen, 1991). For example, mobile phones can give us the sense of never being alone, of carrying with us the potential of always being able to connect to others.

For contemporary young people, exposed to and consuming a range of communication media, consumption and leisure practices, the traditional move from identifying with one’s family to one’s peer group is now one that is likely to involve multiple peer groups. It is therefore more appropriate to think of youth cultures in the plural in order to foreground the multiplicity of identities that orient around the notion of youth and to think of young people moving dynamically between these communities. In previous eras, subcultures, such as hippies or punks, bestowed meaningfulness on those who clearly identified with one group, locating authenticity in those who most closely approximated the permanent alternative lifestyle that reflected the norms associated with this group (McKay, 1998). Now such an understanding of authenticity may be less valued and meaningfulness may be as easily located in temporary, fluid and multiple identities, identities facilitated through technology and consumption practices. So while some people may still strongly identify with one group, others adopt a more playful pick-and-mix approach, moving through a kaleidoscope of fractured scenes and taste cultures (Muggleton & Weinzierl, 2004).

While youth cultures have multiplied and fractured, other, homogenising forces have come into play, including the globalisation of youth cultures and the blurring of adult and youth activities. Communication technologies have aided the globalisation and commercialisation of youth cultures, working as homogenising forces that enable youth cultures to be formed and communicated almost instantly in more or less similar ways across the world (see, for example, Studdert’s (2006) discussion on African Chelsea football club supporters). There has also been a blurring of adult and youth interests and activities. Just as young people delay taking on adult responsibilities and so extend their adolescence into adulthood, older generations too have been less inclined to relinquish youthful activities. The music video game ‘Guitar Hero’, for example, recently advertised itself as cross-generational entertainment for parents and their teenage children to use while queuing together for a festival. Successful movement across these boundaries is not, however, a given. Instead, scenes usually fracture and multiply to accommodate niche markets, for example ‘Baby Raves’ – electronic dance music daytime events held for parents with small children.

Having a range of identities has traditionally been understood as psychologically healthy, since a person can maintain positive self esteem by drawing on other aspects of self if one aspect experiences failure (see, for example, work on Social Identity Theory by Tajfel & Turner, 1986). The increase in opportunities to experience multiple identities may therefore be considered to have positive potential. Creating different identities, such as online avatars or Bluetooth monikers, allow people to construct different senses of selves that represent or allow them to engage in different behaviours and activities. For example, different DJ names can represent different types of music played by that person, freeing the DJ from being pigeon-holed while also allowing him/herself to communicate to his/her potential audience what kind of music to expect on a particular night. However, concern has been raised that the number of identities a person may be expected to dynamically and, in a 24 hour culture, perpetually, move through, can create over-demanding situations, causing stress. Furthermore, some understandings will inevitably clash with others, so that multiplicity is associated with contradiction. For example, young women are expected to both have ‘girl power’ and to be heterosexually attractive, thereby reproducing traditional expectations of femininity (for examples, see Gill 2006, or http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/newFemininities/).

Problems associated with consumption are also implicated in the management of multiple identities, since these different aspects of self are often facilitated through the ability to consume. Participation requires, for example, entrance to clubs, appropriate clothes, or technological equipment. School children regularly use social networking sites after school to communicate with each other, creating social exclusion for those without access to the internet at home. Thus, there are significant structural inequalities in the ability to adopt a playful ‘pick-and-mix’ stance. Indeed significant inequalities may be produced at the most basic level of self-storying, since the most excluded in society may struggle even to tell one, let alone, multiple narratives about themselves.

Neo-liberalism

The need to story oneself with multiple narratives, whether drawn from traditional- or consumption-based identity markers, is particularly relevant because of the dominance of neo-liberalism. Identity has always been an important marker for young people, and engaging in leisure and consumption, such as in choices around appearance and clothes, has played a significant role in this. What is different for today’s youth is the tightening of meaning around identity and consumption that has been facilitated through neo-liberal rhetoric of risk, responsibility and individualism.

Neo-liberalism describes the idea that people are encouraged to see themselves as if they are autonomous, rational, risk-managing subjects, responsible for their own destinies and called “to render one’s life knowable and meaningful through a narrative of free choice and autonomy – however constrained one might actually be” (Gill, 2006, p.260; see also Kelly, 2006). From this position, the social context in which a person lives is reduced to their immediate interpersonal relations, and any personal, social or health problems, and their attendant solutions, are located within the individual. Neo-liberalism allows people to make sense of themselves in individualistic and psychological terms, understanding their consumption practices as freely chosen markers of their identity (Cronin, 2003). Neo-liberal rhetoric of individual choice and responsibility now dominates much of post-industrial sense making about what it means to be a good person. Such changes have been identified as powerful new forms of governance (Rose, 1989). For example, being asked to work excessive and low paid hours may not be considered exploitation but accounted for in terms of a worker’s psychological characteristic of being a helpful person (Walkerdine, 2002). Thus, young people are developing their sense of self in a context in which wider discourses in society encourage them to understand themselves through psychological and individual discourses, rather than those that are communal or sociological.

Neo-liberal subjectivity has been associated with an increased focus on the body as an important site for identity management. For example, there has been a coupling between neo-liberal values of rationality and responsibility and the cultural valuing of slenderness, so that a slender and toned body has come to represent a person who has rational control over their appetites and who acts responsibly in relation to maintaining a healthy body. These associations mean that body size has come not just to signify physical health, but also mental health and morality (Riley, et al, 2008).

The relationship between the body and identity may be particularly important for young people, given that in comparison to adults, young people tend to have less control over other aspects of their lives. Young people may employ a range of body modification techniques, from dieting and weight training to cosmetic surgery or body art. As an example, body art, an umbrella term for a variety of practices including tattoos and piercings, has become increasingly popular as a way of articulating personal and social identities (Riley & Cahill, 2005) and with continued developments in technology and cosmetic surgery may produce ever more creative forms of body modification (for example, the use of implants to create horns).

Youth cultures are often associated with pleasure and hedonism, and the body is central to these issues. For example, electronic music dance culture (also known as ‘rave’) employs technologies such as sound systems, lasers, electronically manufactured music and ‘designer’ drugs to produce hyper real communal and embodied experiences (Wilson, 2006). These experiences allow participants to develop identities and experiences of self that may be incorporated into neo-liberal narratives of self. Neo-liberal rhetoric can also be employed to justify such pleasures, as it can be argued that the individual has the right and freedom to engage in escapism through extreme but pleasurable intoxication (Riley, Morey & Griffin, 2008). Given the excessive weekend drinking seen across Britain’s city centres such a ‘culture of intoxication’, in which people collectively seek and celebrate a loss of control, may be considered normalised for many young people (Measham & Brain, 2005). Paradoxically then, neo-liberal rights and responsibilities discourses may be employed to justify embodied, communal, intoxicated and even ‘mad’ selves, selves that are the antithesis of the rational neo-liberal subject.

Neo-tribalism

Neo-liberalism has arguably come to dominate much of contemporary western thinking about subjectivity, however, it is not without competing discourses. For example, sociologist Michel Maffesoli, while also emphasising the informal and local, argues that contemporary social organisation is highly social. Maffesoli’s theory of neo-tribalism challenges notions of society as increasingly alienated and individualistic and instead characterises daily life as a continuous movement through a range of small and potentially temporary groups that are distinguished by shared lifestyles, values and understandings of what is appropriate behaviour (Maffesoli, 1996). These groups give a sense of belonging and identity, examples of which include gathering to watch football in a bar, participants on service user websites or regular commuters sharing public transport. What distinguishes neo-tribal social formation from traditional social groupings is that people belong to a variety of groups, many of them by choice, so that neo-tribal memberships are plural, temporary, fluid and often elective (Riley, Griffin & Morey, in submission).

Within neo-tribal theory people are understood as moving dynamically through a series of groups, some more partially formed than others, which are in the person’s locality. However, technologies such as the internet make the notion of being ‘local’ relative, since people may share physical or virtual proximity. That neo-tribes are distinguished by the grouping, however temporary in time or space, of people who share lifestyles, values and understandings of what is appropriate behaviour leads Maffesoli to analyse such groups as engaged in moments of ’sovereignty over one’s own existence’. Neo-tribal gatherings provide sovereignty because they create temporary pockets of freedom to engage in behaviours and values associated with that group, which may be different from the values and expected behaviours of other groups (that participants may or may not also be members of). For example, a person may shout aggressively when watching football in a bar, but would not raise their voice at a family meal.

Creating spaces in which to practice one’s group values requires a turning away from other groups in order to ‘do your own thing’. The resultant lack of engagement with other groups, in particular more dominant groups, often leads to youth cultures being constructed as problematic. First, because it is read as a sign of young people failing to engage with adult groups or adult led activities deemed good for the young people. Second, these groups are often understood as challenging the dominant culture or celebrating values at odds with the dominant culture, creating moral panics that construct young people as ‘folk devils’. However, analyses of these groups often show a complex blending of values that both reflect and challenge dominant values. For example, pro-ana websites, which are created by young women to promote the concept of anorexia as a lifestyle choice, are an example of young women engaging in valued practices of being pro-active and employing technological skills. However, they are applying themselves to the promotion of a cause that can lead to serious illness or death. Similarly, setting up an illegal rave requires the bringing together of a diverse set of resources that include entrepreneurial, organisational, musical and electrical engineering skills, skills used to facilitate parties that are unlicensed, held on other people’s property and involve high levels of illicit drug use.

Dominant values themselves are, of course, constantly being negotiated and Maffesoli (1996) argues that there is currently a general move by the ‘masses’ away from the institutional power and rational organisations that defined the modern age to a zeitgeist that celebrates sociality, proximity, emotional attachments and hedonistic values. Thus, when groups create opportunities to practice sovereignty over their existence they are creating spaces in which to engage in values that orient around sociality, emotionality and hedonism. In relating neo-tribalism to young people, it may be useful to recognise the similarities between Maffesoli’s concept of sovereignty and Hakim Bey’s ‘Temporary Autonomous Zones’ (TAZ), a term he uses to describe transitory unsanctioned self-governing sites (Bey, 1991). In coming together to participate in acts of sociality and hedonism, TAZs or neo-tribal gatherings can be understood as providing sites of resistance to a neo-liberal sensibility based on rationality, rights, responsibility and individualism.

The creation of temporary and fluid spaces in which to participate in one’s own values, can be understood as an emerging form of political engagement, an ‘everyday politics’ that focuses on the local, informal or personal, rather than engaging with official organisations and institutional power. Personal lives have been used previously as the basis for political activism (examples being the ‘identity politics’ of feminism, gay/lesbian liberation and black power). However, such forms of political activism, like traditional political activities, often focus on a social change agenda. What distinguishes the new personalised form of politics is that the focus is on creating temporary spaces in which to participate in ones’ own values and associated behaviours – to be able to ‘do your own thing’ – thus participants do not necessarily need to engage with other groups or organisations of governance. Everyday politics is thus about creating spaces in which to live out alternative values, shifting political participation to the ‘everyday’ individual or informal group level.

An ‘everyday politics’ may be particularly relevant for young people because of a perceived lack of attention from those involved in traditional politics to issues of concern for young people (eg the environment). Furthermore, as Harris argues, when young people engage with state institutions to effect social change, their action problematically works to both endorse these systems and to locate themselves in a subordinate position within them: “young people may well have their own ideas about how states and citizenry should operate, and to ask to be included or to participate in the current order is to endorse a system that may be fundamentally at odds with these other visions. Further, it is to accept one’s subordinate position as a fringe dweller who can only ever hope to be invited or asked to participate, but who can never do the inviting themselves” (2001, p.187). Like Maffesoli, Harris argues that one solution is not to engage with institutions associated with governance and power, but to create one’s own spaces of autonomy. Harris’s (2001) work on girlzines is such an example. Harris (ibid.) argued that the young women involved used internet magazines to create their own space from which to negotiate, redefine and reclaim politics, citizenship and novel gender subjectivities. Harris’s work suggests that leisure and entertainment based activities can provide sites for young people to engage in practices that relate to participation and citizenship, providing the opportunity to produce ‘counter stories’ that act as “forms of politics, often misrecognised as entertainment” (Harris, Carney & Fine, 2001, p.12). Neo-liberalism is implicated in ‘everyday politics’ since neo-liberal rhetoric of focusing on the personal through discourses of individual choice and personal responsibility provides the ideological context in which locating political participation at the individual or informal group level makes sense. However, arguments for these forms of political engagement are controversial and empirical work is scattered and underdeveloped (a special issue of ‘Youth’ on everyday politics edited by Anita Harris is currently underway; also see Riley et al, in submission).

Implications

Adolescence and early adulthood are traditionally conceptualised as making up an important time in identity development. Today’s youth experience this time in a context in which the culturally dominant model of the self is of an autonomous, rational, psychological subject who bears ultimate responsibility for the self and who must manage multiple identities, many of which are made available through consumption and technology.

This context provides a range of opportunities for pleasurable and playful engagement with identity, allowing the young people who can take these opportunities to construct a sense of place in the world. However, this construction of self also creates certain stressors. First, locating every success or failure at the personal or psychological level absents other ways of making sense of oneself and masks the impact of structural inequalities on life ‘choices’. Second, the constant pressure to (re)make yourself and manage multiplicity is both demanding and requires the management of contradictory identities. Third, structural inequalities mean that some people do not have the resources to do this kind of identity management.

In masking the impact of structural inequalities neo-liberalism sets the scene for a shift towards a personalising of politics. Locating oneself at the personal and psychological level, coupled with a general move away from engaging with traditional institutional power, creates the context in which it may make sense for young people to focus their political energies on informal acts, such as recycling or benefit gigs for small charities. This shift can be read as reflecting an alienation from traditional politics that is a part of the contemporary British political landscape (Colman & Gøtze, 2001; Harris, 2001), or more positively, as a sign of a zeitgeist swing away from one form of political engagement to another (Maffesoli, 1996).

Although neo-liberalism has come to dominate our understanding of the subject it is one concept amongst many. One alternative to neo-liberalism that also has political potential is neo-tribalism (Maffesoli, 1996). Neo-tribalism argues that our identities are made from moving through a variety of local groups to which we have an emotional attachment, these groups are conceptualised as creating temporary pockets of sovereignty in which to celebrate values of hedonism and sociality. Youth cultures can be conceptualised as neo-tribes, in which young people carve out temporal spaces in which to practice particular sets of values and behaviours. In creating these spaces neo-tribes can be considered as new forms of political participation, since they allow alternative values systems to survive. Young people may therefore create their own neo-tribes in which to celebrate identities that offer an alternative to the rational risk managing neo-liberal subject, the ‘culture of intoxication’ being one such example.

The moral panic that ensued from today’s culture of intoxication is part of a long history of representing ‘youth as problem’ and can be seen to inform tensions around how contemporary young people appropriate space and technology. While being youthful is a valued commodity, young people themselves are often represented as deviant, representations that are classed and gendered – sexually active females, criminally active males, for example (Griffin, 1993). (For a contemporary example, see the very particular and narrow reading of youth in the World Bank’s World Development Report, which locates solutions to problematic youth in formal institutions, absenting the possibilities that youth cultures themselves provide positive spaces for identity development (Luttrell-Rowland, 2007)).

Hedonistic youth cultures can, however, be analysed as attempts to use pleasure as a vehicle for creating positive social alternatives. Rave culture, for example, exhorts the values of PLUR – peace, love, unity and respect (Wilson, 2006). Similarly, excessive weekend drinking in city centres has been analysed as a sign that working class youth have the confidence to use these public spaces in a way that previous generations did not (Chatterton & Hollands, 2003).

However, such forms of resistance may reinforce the overall dominance of neo-liberalism. For example, engaging in intoxicated excesses at the weekend may release tension created by the stress of being a neo-liberal subject, facilitating participants to return to work on Monday. Participants of hedonistic resistance to neo-liberalism often account for their behaviour with neo-liberal rhetoric of rights and risk, arguing that if one is ultimately responsible for oneself then one also has a right to do what one wants with that self (Riley, Morey & Griffin, 2008). There is therefore a complex interaction between alternative and dominant discourses of self since one may be enabled by the other. Young people may be snatching spaces to be ‘free’ but they are using the masters’ tools to do so. Thus, while neo-tribal memberships provide participants with a sense of belonging they may not challenge the neo-liberal construction of self as a project. Furthermore, neo-tribalism still requires the subject to manage multiplicity (in this case of group/tribal based identities) with the attendant stressors of multiplicity described above. Neo-liberal constructions of the self and multiple subjectivities are thus likely to continue into the future as significant ways of understanding oneself and place in the world.

There are examples of young people participating in collective action, a recent example being the anti-Iraq war ‘Not in My Name’ campaign. However, it has been argued that the impact of locating responsibility at the personal level has reduced young people’s ability to make collective challenges since they are less likely to be exposed to discourses of collective experience and struggle, including, for example, those of feminism (McRobbie, 2008). Neo-liberalism may also foster a culture in which the social contract between citizen and government is weakened – if successes or failures are reduced to the interpersonal, then the citizen owes the state nothing.

The proliferation and globalisation of near instant forms of technological communication combined with the multiple and fragmented nature of social lives means that we have available to us an ever shifting kaleidoscope of understandings from which we can draw on in the (re)production of neo-liberal subjectivities. These subjectivities are reduced to their immediate interpersonal relations, to the realm of the personal and psychological, but not necessarily to the private. Communication technologies allow the self to be (re)produced in the public sphere, for example though entries in social network sites such as Facebook, blogs or personal and work websites. Just as every aspect of life can already be seen on TV, so we replay it back using technology to make partial and fractured narratives of ourselves that span space and time. See, for example, ‘FutureMe.org’, an online resource for sending emails to yourself in the future. The ‘best’ of these messages are made public in an anonymous form for entertainment. Indeed it may be that communication technologies are creating a situation where people understand aspects of themselves as only truly meaningful when offered up for the consumption of others. It is possible therefore that communication technologies, such as Web 2.0, are creating a new shift in which the private may only be meaningfully experienced when in the public.

Developments in technology are likely to enhance this process. For example, the ability to store a lifetime of video on an iPod will allow an individual to consume their own life experiences (Cliff, O’Malley & Taylor, 2008). Fear of social exclusion if one doesn’t participate in these technologies, plus surveillance technology, such as CCTV and the use of finger print scanners to ID children in schools, means that there is only limited opt out from these forms of technology. Furthermore, communication technologies do not provide unlimited ways of self-storying. Rather the technologies themselves and the cultural valuing of particular traits create powerful scaffolding around which people build their self-narratives. For example, there are international internet dating websites that require participants to describe the colour of their hair and eyes, despite these being primarily defining features for Caucasian people. Similarly, research on online gaming shows that participants regularly create avatars that fulfil conventional definitions of heterosexually attractive gendered attributes (for example, women create female avatars that have slender, toned bodies) (Waskul & Edgley, 2000).

In the future young people will therefore have to negotiate a self that is splintered off into a series of surfaces that reflect both the technologies that enable them and the cultural mores in which they are located. Sociologist Norbert Elias argued that changes in social structures during the Middle Ages led to a shift in human subjectivity in which the public and private became compartmentalised. Responses to actions such as public defecation changed, so that people moved these behaviours to the private sphere. These changes led to a shift in consciousness in which thoughts could also become private, making, for example, the experience of ‘repressed anger’ a possibility, since previously anger was a public act and not a private experience (that one may or may not express). Changes in contemporary social organisation, enabled through communication technologies, have the potential to create similar radical changes in subjectivity. Notably, a fractured and multiple self experienced in the public sphere and reflected through technology across a range of temporal physical and virtual locations.

Already the internet has produced a situation in which aspects of our selves are created through technology and distributed across time and space. Some of these selves have connections to each other, as in the past selves communicating with future selves as via FutureMe.org. With other selves the connections to the original source(s) are broken or new connections are made, such as forgotten photographs uploaded onto public domains and re-appropriated by friends, colleagues or people unknown. An example of re-appropriation I found was a young girl’s homepage that had a photograph of another (attractive) child on it, with the explanation that ’she looks a bit like me’. It may be that young people will experience fractured and multiple subjectivity in the same way that they are encouraged to consider high street clothing – as tools of identity to be temporarily appropriated, experienced and then cast off in favour of some new look or experience. Future subjectivity may therefore be conceptualised as a collection of multiple, diffuse selves existing across time and space, that have differing degrees of relationships with each other and perhaps no longer needing to be held together by the concept of a ‘core self’.

It is likely, therefore, that in the future young people will need to find ways to exist in the plural. In a preferable future they will be able to develop a sense of being valued and of having opportunities to participate positively in the many social worlds that will be potentially available to them. Schools and other educational institutions will have a duty to help facilitate this.

One way to increase young people’s access to traditional and liquid identities from which to story themselves would be through the creation of more personalised education. In the same way that technologies are enabling increasingly more individually tailored medical interventions, a personalised educational system could be developed in which each student would in effect be their own portfolio manager, managing themselves as a project. The aim for educationalists would be to help young people identify their values, interests and talents and to find ways of using these to develop the various skills they need to become critical and engaged citizens who feel valuated and located in their world.

By drawing on young people’s own interests educators may use leisure and consumption as a way to excite them about education, creating holistic ways to develop young people’s understanding and engagement with their world. Pop music, for example, is often a key site for young people’s interest and identity. Music technologies now allow people to compose music without needing knowledge of musical theory. Creating music with this technology can be used as a starting point for students to gain a sense of self-efficacy, from which they might develop their education holistically, exploring a range of associated subjects including musical theory, socio-political history and practical learning through organising and performing in a concert. It may therefore be an advantage to blur education with entertainment, particularly given the expectation, at least in some sections of society, that work should be enjoyable (Tapscott, 2008).

Future education may require different relations of authority between educational institutions and their students. Already communication technologies have reduced teachers’ control over pupils. For example, school pupils have created a mobile phone ring tone that their teachers cannot hear by recording the ‘mosquito’, a high pitched noise used to keep teenagers away from public amenities like late night shops. Technologies are likely to increase young people’s autonomy, like some contemporary adults they may work (or study) from home, or in the future, they may use biologically embedded technologies only viewable to themselves (Cliff, O’Malley & Taylor, 2008). A personalised education system that incorporates the values and interests of the student is likely to enhance self-motivated study and create more egalitarian relationships with educational institutions. However, respecting the values and interests of students may bring challenges, given that youth cultures are often a complex blend of dominant and counter cultural values. After all, one can confidently predict that young people will sometimes do things not expected or approved of by their elders.

Communication technologies mean that educators and students can draw from a huge range of resources of expertise. For example, lectures from world renowned academics are available on ‘YouTube’. The role of future educators in a personalised educational setting would then be to help young people identify which sites may help them develop the skills they most need to meet their educational interests, values and needs. Educators would also have the role of helping students make links between their personal portfolios and the wider world. For example, identifying transferable skills, connections to the job market and developing critical analytical skills that would help them negotiate their way through their virtual and physical worlds. One way to do this is for students to be encouraged to explore the power of language in structuring the way people understand their world, so that students can critically evaluate the texts that they use through the analytics of argument, reflection and doubt (Gergen with Wortham, 2001; Postman, 1995). Postman (1995), for example, argues for a curriculum that constructs knowledge as historically multiple, borrowed and intermingled. Such a curriculum would introduce plurality and set a framework for understanding one’s own multiplicity, contradictions and socio-historic context.

Drawing on Postman would allow future educators to help young people develop a critical framework to negotiate and manage both their personal and social identities, while challenging some of the individualism of neo-liberalism and allowing young people to explore the impact of taking up particular identities in particular ways. This approach would prepare young people to both positively engage with the requirements of neo-liberal subjectivity, while also having the critical skills to explore alternative discourses, such as those associated with collective identities or spirituality.

In helping young people locate themselves as persons in relationships, embedded in a range of local and global communities educators would act as ‘community enablers’. An example of using communication technologies to develop positive social identity based narratives comes from California, where young Hispanic pupils, living in a context in which their families have lower socio-economic status in comparison to their white counterparts, worked with Web 2.0 technology to produce positive narratives of their ethnic identity, which were then shared between themselves and with their wider community (Rodriguez, 2007). A similar project could, for example, be used with young people in the UK who struggle to find positive self-narratives in their communities (for example, young unemployed working class men in post-industrial Britain (Winlow, 2001)).

Helping young people form positive relationships with their community could be enabled through setting assessments that connect individuals together to demonstrate the values and necessity of group cohesion. Efficacy of group work would be further enhanced if assessments were directly linked to involvement in community action, either in the school or wider community, so that young people were encouraged to consider themselves has having meaningful connections to their communities (see action research and social constructionist approaches in education, eg Gergen with Wortham, 2001; Reason and Bradbury, 2008). Such projects would explicitly or implicitly teach students about social citizenship, and have the potential to tap into neo-tribal values of sociality, emotionality and the pleasures associated with creating pockets of sovereignty over one’s own existence.

Neo-tribal theory argues that as people move in and out of the various groups to which they are affiliated their understanding of what is right and acceptable behaviour becomes relative, since it shifts for each group (Maffesoli, 1996). This form of relativist morality replaces the universal distinction between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ on which modernist notions of morality are based. Maffesoli’s argument is that such a relativist perspective facilitates tolerance, since it allows for, and indeed normalises, a diversity of values and practices across different communities and social groups. If this hypothesis is correct it would be possible for educators to help young people identify their various memberships and to facilitate pride and positive identities in these memberships, without the need to negatively construct out-groups. An ideal outcome of neo-tribalism, then, is to enjoy confidence in one’s own memberships while maintaining an interest in others, a standpoint that may protect young people from being attracted to more fundamentalist orientated identities that provide a sense of security through the creation of a negative ‘Other’.

Future educators could therefore value and work with what students bring to their classes, facilitate successful management of the self as a project and act as community enablers. In a preferable future they would also take on the role of protector. Young people will need protection and guidance in terms of managing their public selves, including the implications of how they present themselves online, as well as managing the stresses of multiple identities (which may include class related expectations of over- or under- achievement). Students will need support in how to engage with technology without getting lost or consumed by it. Young people will also need to be protected against bullying facilitated by technology (eg mass ‘hate’ texts), privacy invasions (by both individuals and government institutions) and virulent advertising.

A preferable future then, is one where schools are fun, interesting, relevant and safe. Places where it is recognised that young people bring a range of interests and values to their educational setting, which are engaged with in order to facilitate the development of positive personal and social identities. A personalised portfolio model of education in which the educator acts as a facilitator may help students gain the skills for successful management of the self as a project, so that they may enjoy the rights and responsibilities attached to neo-liberal subjectivity. However, educators would also need to provide alternative discourses to neo-liberalism, helping young people develop critical faculties and to explore other ways of understanding themselves, in particular as persons in relationships embedded in communities. Educators will also need to act as protective stewards, shielding young people from some of the more aggressive and insidious aspects of technology, surveillance and commercialisation, helping young people develop skills to safely negotiate their identities across the various mediums they will inhabit.

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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This is being used for example at a City Academy in Bristol to replace taking the register and for ordering lunch.

See Gergen with Wortham (2001) for a discussion of social constructionist approach to education, which includes the principles of making education relevant to student’s lives, taking a holistic approach, encouraging reflexivity and making links to activities and actions outside the classroom.

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.