The example of monitorial citizenship that I want to discuss in this blog post is Textizen. Capitalizing on the reality that the majority of the American population has a phone, Textizen sends text messages to help its users spread their message. Through these text messages, users can inform a greater audience about a topic or event as well as collect data regarding the topic. This feature of the website allows users to establish a loop where they can ask users for their input on certain topics through surveys and then ask for them to engage in events pertaining to those topics. If the receiver of the text wants to continue to stay informed on the topic, they could be set up to receive texts regularly. Textizen helps citizens or groups impact more people by spreading their idea/event to a greater amount of people.

Even though Textizen has a general procedure for how its supposed to be used, different citizens might focus on or eliminate certain aspects of the system. For example, the different types of citizens discussed in last week’s class would use Textizen in different ways. A participatory citizen would see Textizen as another route to spread information and get people involved whereas a justice-oriented citizen would rely on the discussion and data collection side of Textizen. As usual, this Textizen user would set up their account, register what issue or topic they want to be discussed and decide what is their target audience. From there, Textizen would send out texts to get the people who the user desired to join their discussion.

At this point, the participatory citizen and the justice-oriented citizen would begin to employ the different tools of Textizen. A participatory citizen would still use surveys to gather information regarding their topic but that would not be their primary concern. If anything, a participatory citizen might use surveys to decide whether or not someone would be willing to physically be a part of an event. When a participatory citizen uses Textizen, they want to get more people to join their cause and to get more people to physically participate in events. For a participatory citizen, the final aspect of Textizen, sustaining engagement, is the most important feature.

The same cannot be said for citizens operating with a justice-oriented mindset. When a justice-oriented citizen uses Textizen, the surveys and other methods of data collection as well as discussions are whats very important. These type of citizens examine the problem and look for a solution to it. In order to discover this solution, the opinions of people and their own proposed solutions as well as data that represents the impact the issue has had on society are going to have to be assessed. This doesn’t mean that a justice-oriented person wouldn’t propose events to try to combat an issue. These events would probably just be stepping stones towards the solution or ways to resolve the issue for a limited time.

Even though these users would probably use Textizen in a different way, this does not mean one is less effective than the other. Both are looking to get other people involved in addressing an issue. As long as Textizen is being used to improve society, both of these examples of citizen are using it correctly.