Changing Citizenship in the Digital Age

By W. Lance Bennett. 2008

585 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Democracy is not a sure thing. Governments and party systems often strain against changes in societies, and some fall prey to corruption and bad policies. Under the right conditions, people may reassert their rights to govern, and produce remarkable periods of creative reform, realignment, and change. In these times, politics becomes a focus of personal life itself, restoring the sense that participation makes a difference. The challenges of influencing the course of nations and addressing global issues may inspire creative solutions from the generations of young citizens who have access to digital communication tools. The cascading advance of media platforms and social software enables unprecedented levels of production and distribution of ideas, public deliberation, and network organization. It is clear that many young citizens of this digital and global age have demonstrated interests in making contributions to society. Yet the challenge of engaging effectively with politics that are linked to spheres of government remains, for most, a daunting prospect. The reasons are numerous. A casual look at world democracies suggests that many of the most established ones are showing signs of wear. Parties are trying to reinvent themselves while awkwardly staying the course that keeps them in power. In the press, in everyday conversation, and often from the mouths of politicians, politics has become a dirty word rather than a commonly accepted vocabulary for personal expression. 1 Perhaps most notably, younger generations have disconnected from conventional politics and government in alarming numbers. These trends in youth dissatisfaction with conventional political engagement are not just occurring in the United States, but have parallels in other democracies as well, including Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. 2 The pathways to disconnection from government are many: adults are frequently negative about politics, the tone of the press is often cynical, candidates seldom appeal directly to young voters on their own terms about their concerns, politicians have poisoned the public well (particularly in the United States) with vitriol and negative campaigning, and young people see the media filled with inauthentic performances from officials who are staged by professional communication managers. 3 Paralleling these developments has been a notable turning away from public life

Subfields: Communication, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f3005aaa23902bea427647ad6e983c06545e6204

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Citations in the corpus

Cultural Citizenship and Cosmopolitan Practice: Global Youth Communicate Online (2010, background): “Increasingly those spaces are digital (Bennett, 2008; Burgess, Foth, & Klaebe, 2006; Hermes, 2006), and the activities that circulate within and across them are symbolizations that draw on multiple modes, that are often compelled by emotion and desire, that blur the domains of private and public, an”
Elements of constructive journalism: Characteristics, practical application and audience valuation (2018, background): “This bottom-up, public-oriented perspective grows out of a new concept of citizenship in the 21st century (Bennett, 2008).”
Social Media Use for News and Individuals' Social Capital, Civic Engagement and Political Participation (2012, background): “…Internet services contribute to society by allowing people to become informed, find common causes and participate in public life more often (e.g., Bennett, 2008), or do they foster shallower relationships, distract people from public affairs and deepen their political and civic disengagement…”
The Mediating Path to a Stronger Citizenship: Online and Offline Networks, Weak Ties, and Civic Engagement (2011, background): “On the other hand, the Internet has also been found to promote nonlocal (or nongeographically bound) citizen networks, such as online communities centered on common interests that perpetuate through discussions and exchanges of information (Bennett, 2008; Smith, Schlozman, Verba, & Brady, 2009).”
Facebook, Twitter, and Youth Engagement: A Quasi-experimental Study of Social Media Use and Protest Behavior Using Propensity Score Matching (2014, background): “this kind of collective experience based on shared interests, representing new forms of citizenship (Bennett, 2008).”
Social media and citizen engagement: A meta-analytic review (2016, background): “In the past 10 years, the proliferation of affordable Internet devices and the rise of social media platforms has enabled highly decentralized (co)-production and dissemination of ideas, public discussion, and deliberation, and allowed for new forms of network organization (Bennett, 2008).”