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On the Facebookification of Civic Life
Three out of four Americans visit Facebook at least once a day, according to Pew Research. Two-thirds visit Instagram at least once a day. Half visit Youtube. This is not because we are addicted to social media, a claim that is thrown around too lightly. As journalist Maia Szalavitz points out, addiction is a compulsive behavior like drug use that continues despite harm. Dependence is when we need a drug to function. We are dependent on these social media platforms because so much of our personal and public lives are conducted through them.
While the lion’s share of attention to how platforms affect our lives goes to Big Questions like, “Should Donald Trump be allowed to come back onto Facebook,” an issue that deserves its own symposium, there are more mundane effects that deserve more notice. So that is why when I saw the title of a new research paper by communications professor Kjerstin Thorson and a group of her graduate students at Michigan State University, I dove in with interest. “Platform Civics: Facebook in the Local Information Infrastructure” (go here to request a copy) is the result of two-part study. Thorson and her team gathered a group of local civic actors and organizations — local elected officials, government agencies, community organizations, libraries and the like — and studied how they used Facebook over the course of 2017 and part of 2018, looking at the…
