By Any Media Necessary. Henry Jenkins

framing practices, and how little room it has for youth participation. But Hay is correct in stressing that participatory politics may be just as likely to generate reactionary as progressive politics, and we have debated where Invisible Children and second-wave libertarianism fall on this spectrum. As we will see in Chapter 6, the young libertarians have sought to negotiate for themselves a space between party politics and more participatory forms of engagement. These new platforms and practices potentially enable forms of collective action that are difficult to launch and sustain under a broadcast model, yet these platforms and practices do not guarantee any particular outcome, do not necessarily inculcate democratic values or develop shared ethical norms, do not necessarily respect and value diversity, do not necessarily provide key educational resources, and do not ensure that anyone will listen when groups speak out about injustices they encounter.

      Forging New Links: Civic Paths and Connected Learning

      A key challenge is to identify the mechanisms that help young people move from being socially and culturally active to being politically and civically engaged. Linda Herrera (2012), for example, interviewed young Egyptian activists to map the trajectory of their involvement with digital media prior to becoming revolutionaries. For many, their point of entry was through recreational use—downloading popular music—trading Hollywood movies, gaming, or sharing ideas through online discussion forums and social networking sites. Mundane involvements in participatory culture exposed them to a much broader range of ideas and experiences than allowed within the official culture of this Islamic nation, encouraged them to acquire digital skills and discover their personal voice, and enabled them to forge collective identities and articulate their hopes for the future. As Herrera concludes, “Their exposure to, and interaction with, ideas, people, images, virtual spaces, and cultural products outside their everyday environments led to a substantial change in their mentality and worldview” (343). Such practices involved transgression against government and religious authorities who sought to restrict their engagement in popular culture; such shared experiences led them to understand themselves as a generation that has developed distinctive cultural and political identities through their engagement with each other via an ever evolving array of digital platforms. We have seen similar patterns throughout our interviews with American youth who have become involved in these various activist movements.

      Many “traditional” civic organizations enable youth to participate based on an apprenticeship model, where they learn through subordinating themselves to a powerful adult mentor. By contrast, our case study groups adopt a more participatory model, in which young people are taking control of and shaping their own modes of engagement. In this model, learning takes place not only vertically, from expert to newcomer, but also horizontally, from peer to peer. Such sites often blur the distinction between interest-based and friendship-based networks that have informed other work in the connected learning tradition described below. Young people may enter a given network based on shared interests and with the intention of working toward collective goals; in the process, they become integrated into rich social communities that often motivate and reward their continued participation. Some of this mentorship is built into the group’s formal activities, while other forms emerge organically as participants learn through practice (Kligler-Vilenchik and Shresthova 2012).

      Current scholarship (Gibson 2003; Bennett 2008b; Wattenberg 2008; Buckingham 2000; P. Levine 2007) suggests that young people are rarely addressed as political agents, that they are not invited into the political process, and that they are not consulted in the political decision-making process, whether local, state, national, or global. According to these studies, young people are most apt to become politically involved if they come from families with a history of citizen participation and political activism, if they encounter civics teachers who encourage them to reflect on and respond to current events, if they attend schools where they are allowed a voice in core decisions, and if they participate in extracurricular activities and volunteerism that gives back to their community. Most forms of activism reach the same core group of participants, who already are politically engaged, and redirect them toward new issues. But the Harry Potter Alliance and the Nerdfighters, for example, often target young people who are engaged culturally, who may already be producing and sharing fan art, and help them to extend their engagement into politics, often by deploying existing skills and capacities in new ways. Kahne, Lee, and Feezell (2011) discovered that involvement in online networks organized around shared interests (fandom, for example) also shapes political identities: “online, nonpolitical, interest-driven activities serve as a gateway to participation in important aspects of civic and, at times, political life, including volunteering, engagement in community problem-solving, protest activities, and political voice” (2).

      The Carnegie Corporation’s report on the Civic Mission of Schools (Gibson 2003) argues that educational institutions play a crucial role in allowing students to rehearse civic skills by participating in decision-making processes directly impacting their lives, yet many schools are backing away from this historic mission because they fear controversy with parents or loss of control over school governance in what is seen as a risky time for American education. Lauren Bird, the 20-something-year-old communications director for the Harry Potter Alliance, represents the kind of youth who might have fallen through the cracks under these conditions. Across a series of interviews, Bird shared a personal story about how schools fail to engage students with the political process:

      I wasn’t terribly civically engaged when I was younger. I had some teachers who told us of the importance of watching the news and being responsible citizens and I followed that advice as best I could, but the contents of the news or just what being a “responsible citizen” meant, was rarely discussed. I grew up in a suburb in Texas during the War on Terrorism. You can guess the kind of ideologies most of my educators held. As I started realizing that I didn’t agree with most of the things the culture around me preached, I quickly learned to stay silent and pretend I did.… I wish I had had more grown up examples of diverse and critical thinking. I wish there had been more teachers who were talking about current events or about how to get involved in our communities.… That would’ve gotten my feet wet to want to be more proactive and involved.

      We first interviewed Bird as a comparative literature student at New York University, who had just starting to become more actively involved as a video blogger for the Harry Potter Alliance. Bird recounted having been invested in the Harry Potter books since the age of eight and doing video projects since high school. Bird was drawn into the social media around fandom and participated online but never “IRL” (in real life). In high school, an encounter with the videos created by John and Hank Green led to a discovery of the Nerdfighter community. But Bird developed interest in the civic aspect when the Harry Potter Alliance was involved in Help Haiti Heal (a campaign that raised enough money to fund five cargo planes full of disaster relief supplies) in 2010—and was amazed by the ways fans used their power to help. A few months later, Bird applied to a video editor position with the HPA and is now a paid staff member; Bird will resurface later in the book as a participant in some of the group’s Hunger Games and Not in Harry’s Name campaigns. Today, Bird remains more engaged by the fannish aspects—rather than the specifically political dimensions—of the organization’s mission.

      This moment when Bird was able to put all of these pieces together—linking creative skills, fannish ties, and the desire to make a difference—represents an example of what Mimi Ito, Lissa Soep, and their collaborators (Ito et al. 2015) describe as “consequential connections,” a concept that has emerged from the MacArthur Foundation’s Connected Learning Initiative. Connected learning research (Ito et al., 2012) seeks to identify and map “the constructed features of the cultural and social environment that support connections, brokering, and translations across spheres of activity,” primarily in terms of the ways young people’s interests and activities within their homes or their peer culture relate to what gets valued by schools and other powerful institutions in their lives. Ito et al. (2015) argue, “Learning is most resilient and meaningful when it brings together multiple spheres of a young person’s life.” For Bird, school-based civics education failed to motivate civic action, whereas fan activism brought increased awareness and encouraged deploying recreational skills toward political ends.

      A white paper on connected learning (Ito et al. 2012) describes some underlying assumptions:

      Connected