CITIZENSHIP AND COMMUNICATION IN ONLINE YOUTH CIVIC ENGAGEMENT PROJECTS

Abstract

This study analyses 36 online civic engagement websites for youth to understand the civic skills and communication opportunities offered to youth in different online environments. The research design draws on recent theoretical work on citizen identity and the design features of online communities to develop a picture of online engagement projects in two dimensions: the model of citizenship encouraged and the style of communication available to users. Results suggest that the citizenship styles inscribed in sites are correlated with the styles of communication the sites offer. In particular, sites that present more conventional civic skills, such as appealing to government for solutions to problems, tend to heavily control how users use the sites; in contrast, those that present citizenship as a broader, expressive engagement with issues and culture are less inclined to define the terms of users’ interactions. This article discusses the implications of the findings for understanding how online civic projects succeed or fail to connect with young people, the possibility of creating sites that both appeal to young people and offer important civic skills, and directions for future study and practice.

Keywords:

• e-Learning
• politics
• social networking
• Web 2.0
• young people
• citizenship

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Lance Bennett, John Gastil and Patricia Moy for their insights and helpful comments on the manuscript, and Victoria Barq and Matt Schoenemann for their assistance with the research.

Notes

All of the sites identified by the processes described earlier were assessed by the author using those criteria. Sites that qualified as youth-focused sites almost always had the words ‘youth’ or ‘young people’ featured prominently on the site. Sites that qualified as primarily web-based projects described the online features of their programmes prominently; they almost always encouraged individuals to use the site to be engaged, ‘About’ sections described the importance of the web in the programme's goals, and ‘History’ sections described the design and construction of the site and sometimes described when the programme was ‘launched’. In terms of the third criterion, all the sites assessed were determined to be attempting to engaged users in some way and qualified based on this criterion.

The three codes that did not reach 80 per cent agreement were AT1 (user-generated content on the homepage), DC1 (activities involving government), and AC1 (political activities not involving government). The pairwise agreements for those codes in the final test coding were 60, 73, and 73 per cent, respectively.