Constructing Australian youth online
Abstract
Introduction When I started to write this chapter I noticed that it was national Cyber Security Awareness Week in Australia and the federal government agency, the Australian Communication and Media Authority, announced a number of new initiatives: including Cybersmart Hero, a new online anti-cyberbullying activity for students in the last year of primary school; a new SMS spam reporting tool; and Cybersafety Outreach - a programme to provide pre-service teachers with the skills and confidence they will need to manage cybersafety education and awareness issues in schools today, including a section on e-security. Earlier in the year we celebrated ‘Safer Internet Day’. While the Authority’s tagline is ‘communicating, facilitating, regulating’ it is quickly apparent that the discursive energy of local governance structures is mostly spent on discussing risk and safety issues to do with the Internet. While there is a nascent focus on facilitating digital literacy this has been overridden by a discourse of protection from cyber risks and focus on policy-making (see Osborne 2010). This focus was also seen in the high-profile Australian debate about Internet filtering and blacklisting of particular websites. The federal government proposed this policy in 2007 but due to widespread public and political disquiet, and innovative online campaigns, it has not yet been passed through Parliament or implemented. There is minimal policy discussion in Australia of a progressive ideal of digital democratic citizenship (see Coleman and Blumler 2009). It is this tension between a democratic ideal (that reflects how young people engage with the Internet) and the discursive context (that reveals a fear of technological change) that provides an important framework for understanding whether and/or how youth-based websites create new spaces for civic and political engagement. This chapter presents a longitudinal content analysis of a mixture of government-and community sector-led sites that are either wholly online or tied to established offline organisations, to establish what kind of citizenship practices and ideals are made available to Australian young people. Australia provides an appropriate base for analysis as in recent times it has experienced a debate, similar to that in most advanced democracies, about the disengagement of young people from the political process (see Bean 2007). To a large extent the debate has been hidden from the broader comparative context due to compulsory voting in Australia and high turnout rates of the general population. In other nations, especially the UK and USA, low turnout at elections by young people has created cause for concern and generated discussion on civic engagement and a democratic deficit (see for example, Furlong and Cartmel 2007, pp. 21-37). Arguably, Australia has seen a similar level of more generalised political disengagement when attitudes towards the formal political sphere are taken into account (Edwards 2007). Australia also has a government that is prepared to launch interventionist policy-making to change young people’s behaviours in general (Bessant 2004; White and Wyn 2008). The Australian federal government’s approach to youth participation is underpinned by the idea that young people need to be enabled through ‘empowerment’ strategies to become active, ‘responsible’ citizens (based on Barnes et al. 2007). My earlier research found that these ideas or discourses about young people are entrenched in the thinking of high-level government and community decisionmakers, and shape youth participation policy practice in both community and government services. That is, decision-makers believe that young people need to be empowered to ‘have a say’ on both democratic matters and youth services, and that it is young people’s civic duty to be engaged in public affairs (Vromen forthcoming; also see Livingstone 2009a; Eliasoph 2009). Overall, it was found in both focus group discussion and a survey of service providers that decisionmakers could ‘talk the talk’ on the need for change in institutional structures to shift participation away from a top-down approach towards the use of more interactive online technology. However, the discursive and actual barriers to doing this are clearly too significant to overcome as there have been few real instances of decision-makers demonstrating to young people that they are heard and are, through their views and actions, able to ‘make a difference’ in youth policy and service delivery (see Australian Youth Affairs Coalition 2010). Changing youth participation practice necessitates a shift in thinking on the way young people are understood as ‘contemporary youth participation policies do not treat young people as active political agents with existing preferences derived from their lived experience’ (Vromen forthcoming; see also Horsley and Costley 2008). In this chapter I am interested in building on this earlier research to see what has happened online in youth-oriented websites for civic engagement in Australia. That is, do these websites, which are developed by both government and non-government organisations and are online-only or online representations of established offline organisations, follow this generally institutionalised, topdown approach to young people’s civic engagement? Or are they alternate democratic spaces that both engage with young people’s everyday lives, and develop young people’s capacity for political expression (see Bang 2005; Collin 2008)? For example, Harris et al. (2010, p. 27) found in their survey of young Australians that the Internet was a significant part of young people’s everyday civic lives, and that they used it ‘for leisure, but also to “have a say”, especially with their peers, with whom they can make shared social and political meanings out of their individual circumstances’.