Young people, ICTS and Democracy (original) (raw)
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The Routledge international handbook of children, adolescents and media studies , 2013
She practiced public relations and taught communication in the U.S. Her current research interests include social networking sites and youth practices, media literacy and youth civic participation. She has written several papers on these subjects. Also, individually and in collaboration with others, she has obtained a number of large grants from the EU. Abstract This chapter reviews current research exploring the role of web 2.0 technologies in facilitating civic interests and expression among youth. Youth have been found to be uninterested in the news media and apathetic about participating in public life. However, some research is indicating that this characterization may be inaccurate as it does not recognize the ways in which youth incorporate their civic interests and media content into their everyday lives. In view of the participation opportunities that new media offer and the ways in which young people utilize online tools available to them, important questions are emerging about whether and how youth use digital technologies to contribute to the public sphere online and strategies to further promote online participation among youth. This review includes works that aim to provide new insights on advocacy scholarship and practice, and these works are presented as a new starting point for further validation and debate.
In a variety of ways young people today are represented as a new digital generation, not one that has learnt about technology in their teenage years, but one who has grown up with it. Digital Natives. Undifferentiated in this rhetoric, young people are for the most part presumed to have greater ease with the world wide web and mobile communication technologies than their parents. They are the texters and game players, the re-mixers and uploaders of content. The idea that such a generation must think about citizenship, identity and politics in imaginative and unorthodox ways and that civic action in online environments will appeal to them more naturally than offline action has also now become a commonplace suggestion in writing on this subject. But what effects do such assumptions about young citizens have in real civic contexts? How do conceptualisations of youth as digital natives inflect the ways in which civic and political producers attempt to appeal to them in on and offline environments? And what do young people have to say about their feelings towards digital technologies, politics and civic action? Drawing on key findings and data from an extensive seven-country, three-year European project ‘CivicWeb: Young People, the Internet and Civic Participation’, this chapter unpicks the rhetoric around the digital generation doing politics online and points to the ways in which further civic exclusions and disadvantage might accrue to certain groups of youth if all are perceived as equally free, skilled and active online.
2010
The increasingly salient role of new media in young people's lives has led to a debate about the potential of the internet as a means of political communication and youth participation. While a growing body of scholarship has engaged with the issue, there is lack of empirical research linking young people's civic motivations to their internet uses, and in particular to their evaluations, as users, of UK civic websites. This thesis brings together the study of youth civic engagement and the practice of user experience in order to explore ...
AVRASYA Uluslararası Araştırmalar Dergisi, 2019
Abstract Today, digital social platforms, as a tool for political expression or activities, are an important part of everyday life for younger generations. However, at times, especially during times of crisis nation states may perceive these digital platforms as a threat. Thus, over the last twenty years, states are increasingly willing to restrict access to content on the internet or block access to digital social at varying degrees. In this study, young people‟s thoughts or attitudes about the state policies such as restricting or blocking access to digital social platforms permanently or temporarily has been examined in the context of democracy and freedom. In the context of the qualitative method, in-depth interviewing technique was used as data collection tool. The sample of the research is composed of young people who are studying at Aydın Adnan Menderes University in Turkey. According to findings, there is two main alternative approaches or attitudes towards the potential of digital social platforms to spread democracy and freedom: views of cyber-utopians and cyber-skeptics. Though there are different attitudes towards the state policies such as restricting and blocking access to digital social platforms, it is thought that the resources or facilities offered by the digital world may positively contribute to democracy and freedom in real terms as long as people and other internet stakeholders such as governments, policymakers are acting responsibly.
New media, new citizens: the terms and conditions of online youth civic engagement.
2010
The increasingly salient role of new media in young people's lives has led to a debate about the potential of the internet as a means of political communication and youth participation. While a growing body of scholarship has engaged with the issue, there is lack of empirical research linking young people's civic motivations to their internet uses, and in particular to their evaluations, as users, of UK civic websites. This thesis brings together the study of youth civic engagement and the practice of user experience in order to explore the civic factors and website elements that motivate young people to participate via the internet. Employing a large survey and a qualitative study of a purposively sampled community of young citizens and internet users, the research explores youth civic needs and how these translate into specific uses of the web. Furthermore, a comprehensive content analysis of twenty civic websites is juxtaposed with a user experience study, in order to facilitate a dialogue between the online text and the users.
2020
This thesis explores how meaningful the concept of digital citizenship is to young people in Aotearoa New Zealand. In an increasingly digitally-mediated society, the way young people learn what it means to be a citizen online, and the behaviours consistent with belonging and connecting to digitally-mediated communities, are increasingly important. Digital citizenship, however, is an evolving concept. Digital citizenship arises when the inherent complexity of the notion of 'citizenship' intersects with the interrelational spaces offered by digital technologies and as a result makes possible new ways of being a citizen and doing citizen(ship) practices. In education, definitions of digital citizenship construct an 'ideal' digital citizen by outlining desired behaviours, dispositions, and skills, which normalise particular ways of being and doing. How meaningful idealised concepts are to young people, and whether definitions align with young people's understanding of what it means to be a digitally-mediated citizen, has not been fully examined in New Zealand. To explore how meaningful the concept of digital citizenship is to young people, this thesis operates at a theoretical junction, drawing upon multiple historical conceptualisations of citizenship (see for example, Heater, 2004; Mutch, 2005), understandings of discourses (Foucault, 1972), notions of space and place (Massey, 2005), and Bourdieu's theory of practice (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992), specifically notions of capital and habitus. Taking a qualitative approach, I conducted focus groups and individual interviews with 28 young people, aged between 16 and 25, from diverse backgrounds. The resulting data were analysed using an iterative, inductive approach to explore young people's meaning-making and ways of being and doing digital citizenship. These findings are presented in four parts that focus upon the way young people defined, shaped, located, and practised their citizenship and digital citizenship. The findings show that digital citizenship is indeed, "many things to many people" (Vivienne, McCosker, & Johns, 2016, p. 15). While 'digital citizenship' was a new term for participants, they drew upon their understandings of citizenship to define digital citizenship as habitus (or ways of being) that, along with digital capital, is embodied through digitallymediated practices. They located their digital citizen habitus through their sense of belonging and connectedness to places and spaces, and they embodied their digital citizen habitus through practices that reflected their lived realities. For these young people, digital iv citizenship was a fluid and nuanced process of digitally-mediated, participatory citizenship practices informed by everyday lived experiences. I argue that, if 'digital citizenship' is to be meaningful for young people, there is a need for educators to recognise young people as experts on their lived realities, to encourage reflection upon taken-for-granted digital practices and spaces, and to highlight the relational aspects of citizenship practices online and offline. While the young people in this study offered definitions of digital citizenship, creating a meaningful and shared concept requires a youth-centric approach that recognises everyday citizenship practices and empowers young people to co-construct ways of being and doing citizen(ship) in digitally-mediated spaces.
2019
1 This article is part of the project entitled “Redes sociales, adolescentes y jóvenes: convergencia de medios y cultura digital” (Social networks, adolescents and youth: the convergence of the media and digital culture) (CSO2016-74980-C2-2-R), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (2017-2020). Beatriz Catalina-García. PhD in Communication Science from Rey Juan Carlos University (2011). She completed a degree in Journalism at UCM (1989) and a degree in Political Science at UNED (2014). Visiting Professor of Journalism at Rey Juan Carlos University. She currently participates in the regional project co-financed with EU funds entitled “PROVULDIG, Program of Activities on Digital Vulnerability” (2016-2018), and in the national project entitled “Social networks, adolescents and young people: media convergence and digital culture”, funded by the Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness of Spain (2017-2020). Her research work is related to the di...
2018
1 This article is part of the project entitled “Redes sociales, adolescentes y jóvenes: convergencia de medios y cultura digital” (Social networks, adolescents and youth: the convergence of the media and digital culture) (CSO2016-74980-C2-2-R), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (2017-2020). Beatriz Catalina-García. PhD in Communication Science from Rey Juan Carlos University (2011). She completed a degree in Journalism at UCM (1989) and a degree in Political Science at UNED (2014). Visiting Professor of Journalism at Rey Juan Carlos University. She currently participates in the regional project co-financed with EU funds entitled “PROVULDIG, Program of Activities on Digital Vulnerability” (2016-2018), and in the national project entitled “Social networks, adolescents and young people: media convergence and digital culture”, funded by the Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness of Spain (2017-2020). Her research work is related to the di...