Everyday Political Agency Online: Reflections on John Boswell, How Citizens Encounter the Democratic State

Digital democracy needs tools and platforms for people to engage with public life and governance. Yet we know surprisingly little about the political life of this ‘civic technology’ infrastructure. How do citizens make use of these well-intentioned invitations to participate? In this article, I draw on new work by John Boswell in How Citizens Encounter the Democratic State to consider civic tech users’ everyday, creative political agency and whether digital tools help them build working relationships with local representatives and bureaucrats. I draw on platform affordances and insights from a research project into local civic tech use in South London to describe a largely unexamined kind of politics: everyday online politics that works by ‘composing’ across many platforms, however imperfectly, rather than skilled use of any single one.