metric? i'm not sure the goal is to measure civic engagement. in terms of praxis? certainly at some level you must recognize and remove yourself (perhaps not entirely, but certainly some individuals could certainly stand to reduce their consumption) from this attention-grabbing apparatus of major media entertainment. what does civic engagement/politics look like? different based on location, but some potentialities: (1) individual volunteer work [ex. PGH has a fantastic "Garbage Olympics" event between neighborhoods] (2) organizational work [ex. supporting the efforts of a political campaign is obvious, but so are non-political groups like BigBroBigSis] (3) local participation [ex. actually attending city council meetings occasionally, not that difficult!], and finally [the least important for this particular group to me personally, but the one that major media entertainment push as the solution] is (4) electoral process [voting]