Disempowering by assumption: digital natives and EU civic web project. In: Thomas, Michael , (ed.) Deconstructing Digital Natives: Young People, Technology, and the New Literacies. Routledge, New York, USA, pp. 49-66. (original) (raw)
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.
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