Learning digital citizenship in publics of practice : how adults learn to use activist hashtags on Twitter (original) (raw)
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The civic potential of memes and hashtags in the lives of young people
Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education
Young people today are immersed in digital culture: often considered savvy navigators of online ecosystems and adept at using everyday technologies to share, create and express. These technologies are often seen as social and personal tools instead of spaces for meaningful participation. This paper shares the results of an investigation in young people's attitudes towards popular social communication modalitiesmemes and hashtagsfor civic purposes. The study employs Emerging Citizens: a suite of digital literacy tools and accompanying learning content that teach people of all ages how to critique and create hashtags and memes. This inquiry explores how young people perceive memes and hashtags as relevant avenues for civic expression, and the impact that a digital literacy intervention can have on youth attitudes. An analysis of the student experience using the Emerging Citizens tools and reflection of their creations finds that digital literacy interventions impact young people's perceptions of popular social modalities for civic impact.
International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning (iJET), 2020
The rapid development of technology and communication had given birth to a new world order that gave an impact on all aspects of the lives of citizens. This new world order was often known as social media; a new media that was born in the digital era as a result of the existence of the internet. This media made the mobility of citizens' lives became faster so that the interaction among them almost has no boundary, and resulted in the concept of digital citizenship. The emergence of social media certainly brought positive and negative impacts that automatically created disruption to citizens' behavior. The phenomenon of the spread of black campaigns, hate speech, false news (hoaxes), heated arguments toward each other became a common issue as a result of the citizens' unpreparedness in facing an era of disruption. Therefore, digital literacy was a necessity in this era of disrupted society so that becoming a smart and good citizen would not only be a discourse on the issue of citizenship.
Protesting on Twitter: Citizenship and Empowerment from Public Education
The use of social networks for protest purposes has been an essential element in recent global protests against the economic measures of privatization of public services. Social networks are changing political communication , mobilization and organization of collective protests. Taking into account the relationship between collective protests and new forms of network communication, the aim of this article is to analyze the new forms of citizenship empowerment from the collective protests in defense of public education in Spain. In the last five years the movement " Marea Verde " has generated protests on twitter that have generated new forms of empowerment of citizenship in the Spanish context. In this article we have analyzed three accounts of twitter with great activity and prominence, by the numbers of followers and tweets, of the social networks by «Marea Verde». In this article four categories of analysis have emerged that agglutinate and characterize the demands of collective protests through social networks. Two of the categories have been generated to reject the privatization of education and the standardized tests of the new educational reform act in the Spanish context. The other two categories claim for public education and an educational consensus between the political forces and the educational community.
Digital Activism and Democracy: An Analysis of Select Hashtags on Twitter (2016-2020)
Communicator (ISSN: 0588-8093), 2021
This study tries to analyze the popular narratives, created and sustained via hashtags, on social media platforms, including those related to online activism. It looks at how digital activism has shaped up in India over the last few years. It analyzes tweets and hashtag trends of the last five years to understand people's engagement with the Twitter as a site of 'New Public Sphere'. It delves into the theory to understand the phenomenon of digital activism and hashtags. It looks at, if participation of people in digital activism has increased over the years and what were the major issues that people engaged with in 2020.
This article explores how social media use in formal and informal learning spaces can support the development of digital citizenship for secondary school students. As students increasingly spend large amounts of time online (e.g., an average of six hours of screen time per day, excluding school and homework), it is critical that they are developing skills enabling them to find, evaluate, and share information responsibly, engage in constructive conversation with others from diverse backgrounds, and to ensure their online participation is safe, ethical, and legal. And, yet, in spite of the importance of students learning these skills, opportunities for digital citizenship in formal and informal learning spaces have lagged behind our ideals. The article provides a conceptual analysis of civic engagement as digital citizenship and considers how digital media applications can support citizenship education in middle-and high-school grades. Then, empirical research is provided that demonstrates how high school students develop digital citizenship practices through out-of-school practices. Finally, this article suggests that both dimensions of digital citizenship (i.e., in-school, traditional citizenship education and out-of-school activities aimed at civic engagement) can be integrated through a social media-facilitated curriculum. Finally, recommendations for teaching and learning through social media are offered to educators, community members, practitioners, parents, and others. The Perception of Internet Risks and the Need for Digital Citizenship Digital citizenship is once again in the news, as parents, teachers, administrators and schools embrace the notion of teaching students about media literacy and safe and responsible internet use. Recently, spurred by the perceived dangers of online life, including cyberbullying, sexting, harmful contact, and other psychological or physical threats, states such as Washington, California, Texas and others have proposed or passed legislation calling for formal education that instructs students about how to use information technology effectively in order to maintain student safety, privacy, and health and well-being. While internet researchers instruct us to value the benefits from internet use (Livingstone & Brake, 2010), sensational stories are often quite persuasive, such as the Slenderman story. In 2014, two 12-year old girls lured a friend into the rural Wisconsin forest, stabbing her 19 times in an attempt to impress Slenderman, a fictitious character who appears online and in internet memes (Gretter, in press). The girls were taken in by Slenderman's persuasive online presence, and according to authorities, convinced his followers they needed to kill somebody in order to earn his respect. Fortunately, the victim survived the brutal attack, though the dangers of life online were again exposed. Sensational (if truthful) accounts such as these contribute to the need to teach K-12 students the media literacy skills that will keep them safe online. Washington's proposal was supported by Common Sense Media, which is one of the leaders in the field, providing 76% of all public schools in the U.S. with digital citizenship curricula. This popular digital citizenship package teaches students a variety of topics, including internet safety, privacy and security, information literacy, and cyberbullying and digital drama (www.commonsense.org). The risks to young people are real, even if most adolescents will thankfully never find themselves trying to appease a character like Slenderman. Livingstone and Brake reported that 72% of young people in the U.S.
Introduction "Digital Citizens", Digital Culture & Society, Vol. 4, Issue 2/2018
Digital Citizens, 2018
Today, engagement and participation are considered key when we investigate media and user practices. Participation has become a popular imperative of digital societies. A number of theoretical reflections on digital societies assume that social media are becoming a dominant media channel for participatory engagement. Practices of participation and engagement are an indispensible part of our digital everyday lives: from chat rooms to community forums, from social media platforms to image boards, and from rating platforms to whistle-blowing websites. The Internet is used for a wide variety of forms of participation in culture, education, health, business and politics. On the one hand these digital collectives are deemed the torchbearers of the coming social and political transformation or hailed as self-organized collective intelligence. On the other hand state appa- ratuses are asking for participative activities to increase efficiency and to avoid friction. It is argued that the use of technology fosters participation and processes of consensus-building. The terms “cultural citizenship” and “digital citizenship” are expected to provide a broader but also a more critical approach to citizen engage- ment. In the meantime, there are numerous studies that examine the different forms and effects of participation on the Internet and its limitations. Our special issue "Digital Citizens" discusses theoretical and artistic investigations on citizen engagement, digital citizenship and grassroots information politics. The articles reflect on the role of the digital citizen from the perspectives of (digital) sociology, science, technology and society (STS), (digital) media studies, cultural studies, political sciences, and philosophy.
(Digital) Citizenship: Dissenting from Indifference
Springer eBooks, 2022
Now that we have come to know the teachers who participated in this study, we can turn our attention to the study's findings. This chapter and the next will report on the cross-case analysis of this study, examining the teachers' stories together to look for common meanings, understandings, and experiences. Additionally, these two chapters will put the findings from this study into dialogue with prior research around digital citizenship, best practices in civic education, and the use of social media for learning. Most teachers spoke about digital citizenship during their interviews, but they spoke about it both more broadly and more deeply than it is often referred to in the literature. The teachers felt a responsibility to teach students about civic life in all the spaces which it happened, whether that was formal or informal, in person or online, organized or ad hoc. Teachers felt that there was no real dichotomy between online and offline citizenship, and they also felt that the term digital citizenship was detrimental to encouraging students' civic participation. Thus, the first theme which emerged from this study was that teachers should prepare their students to participate in civic life in both online and offline spaces. As the teachers did not see a meaningful difference in civic participation based on the spaces in which it occurred, I have termed this first theme (digital) citizenship.
@ is for Activism: Dissent, Resistance and Rebellion in a Digital Culture
'@ is For Activism' examines the transformation of politics through digital media, including digital television, online social networking and mobile computing. Joss Hands maps out how political relationships have been reconfigured and new modes of cooperation, deliberation and representation have emerged. This analysis is applied to the organisation and practice of alternative politics, showing how they have developed and embraced the new political and technological environment. Hands offers a comprehensive critical survey of existing literature, as well as an original perspective on networks and political change. He includes many case studies including the anti-war and global justice movements, peer production, user created TV and 'Twitter' activism. "@ is For Activism" is essential for activists and students of politics and media. Note the version here is a pre-print proof which differs from the published version and should not be cited from.
Remediating participation and citizenship practices on social network sites
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Coming Together Around Hashtags: Exploring the Formation of Digital Emergent Citizen Groups
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It has been well established that during and after crisis or emergency events, groups of citizens come together to help one another, solve problems, and manage recovery or cleanup. These groups are called emergent citizen groups. They form organically and often disband when the emergency is managed. This study proposes that similar types of groups now form in digital spaces during and after crises. The authors studied conversation on Twitter that used the hashtag “#PrayforUSC” after the murder-suicide that took place at the University of South Carolina in 2015. Initial results indicate that hashtags can function as focal points or catalysts for digital emergent citizen groups. More research should be done to determine whether and how these groups form, function, and disperse.