Doubtful dialogue: how youth navigate the draw (and drawbacks) of online political dialogue

ABSTRACT

Social media platforms like Twitter are venues for 24/7 political discussion – including deliberation, everyday banter, and bickering. For youth, these platforms offer new opportunities and risks for participation, and suggest corresponding implications for civic education. This qualitative, exploratory study examines how 15 civic youth (ages 15–25) in the United States define and carry out political dialogue on social media platforms. We compare youths’ reported online dialogue strategies with strategies observed in digital artifacts of their posts. Findings suggest that youths’ conceptions of good online dialogue and its key ingredients – knowledge, respect, and diversity – are aligned with their practices in many respects. However, juxtaposing artifacts of youths’ online dialogue threads with reported strategies surfaced disjunctions, related to (1) perceived dialogue style and (2) perceptions of the value of online dialogue. Building on recent studies of novel classroom approaches, this study suggests promising entry points for educators and curricula to support youth to navigate the risks and opportunities of online spaces for civic expression and dialogue.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth
• social media
• dialogue
• political talk
• civic education

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the MacArthur Foundation’s Youth and Participatory Politics Research Network. The authors are grateful to Howard Gardner, Margaret Mullen, Daniel Gruner, Ashley Lee, Emily Weinstein, Erica Hodgin, Michelle Hagerman, and anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Carrie James is a Research Associate and Principal Investigator at Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research explores young people’s digital, civic, and moral lives.

Megan Cotnam-Kappel is Assistant Professor and specialist in the field of Educational Technology at the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Her research agenda targets the empowerment of youth and teachers through development of digital literacies, including skills related to digital making, coding, and digital citizenship.

ORCID

Carrie James http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1665-5311

Megan Cotnam-Kappel http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9977-5097

Notes

1 Our use of the word, ‘political,’ is intended in a broad sense, meant to capture not just electoral or institutional politics but also ‘issues of public concern’ (Kahne, Middaugh, and Allen 2015, 37) and ‘civic’ to encompass the even broader realm of public and community life (Flanagan and Faison 2001). We also use the terminology of ‘digital civic youth’ and ‘digital civic participation’ to reference young people’s use of digital technologies and social media affordances to engage in public life – e.g., tweeting about a preferred candidate for political office, posting memes that mock public figures, organizing rallies, using crowdfunding sites to raise money to address a community need, etc.

2 To protect their identities, participants’ names are replaced by pseudonyms of their choosing and social media posts are de-identified.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation: [Prime Award No. 13-103229].