“Cognitive Democracy,” in Youth, New Media and Political Participation – with Cosma Shalizi – eds. Danielle Allen and Jennifer Light

In Parts I through III, we extended the definition of the political, acquired a richer view of participation, explored how to model and analyze partic-ipation broadly defined, and ascertained what sort of mechanisms to look for to understand public spheres in this context. As those chapters explored the specific experiences of individuals partic-ipating in hip hop communities, in immigration activism, in efforts to stop SOPA/PIPA or overthrow a regime, and in ordinary social media contexts, they also collectively assembled a set of normative criteria for assessing the health of civic agency and civic relationships: authenticity, political equal-ity, viable nonconformist and audacious visibility, openness to social vul-nerability, equal inclusion, reasonable public deliberation, effective civic education, and the value of social power as a counterbalance to corporate and governmental power. This is a capacious set of ideals for thinking about the nature of good citizenship. Their interplay strikingly reveals an emer-gent collective desire for civic relationships in which audacious and non-conformist but also egalitarian and democratic visibility, as well as effective public deliberation, can be achieved simultaneously.These ideals emerged in chapters 1 through 8 because they contributed to the analytical tools each scholar was using to analyze a distinctive empirical case or set of questions. In other words, we have been backing into a set of commitments for how to understand the differences between successful and problematic forms of participation. Here in part 4, “Participatory Vistas,” we approach this question frontally. What normative frameworks will best help us navigate the question of how to distinguish successful from prob-lematic forms of participation?

Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi, “Cognitive Democracy,” Youth, New Media and Political Participation eds. Danielle Allen and Jennifer Light (Chicago University Press: 2015).

Farrell, Henry and Shalizi, Cosma Rohilla. “9 Pursuing Cognitive Democracy”. From Voice to Influence: Understanding Citizenship in a Digital Age, edited by Danielle Allen and Jennifer S. Light, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015, pp. 209-231. https://doi.org/10.7208/9780226262437-011

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